I don’t have a strong specific policy preference as far as health care reform goes, but I was out eating with some friends this weekend and was provided, courtesy of the CNN playing on the TV at the restaurant, with a telling example of how the health care debate is being carried on. (Usually I avoid cable news like the plague.) It was a special on health care reform (hosted by Wolf Blitzer, I think) and they kept talking about the dread “slippery slope” toward Canadian- or UK-style “socialized medicine.” There are several problems with this including 1) it presumes that “socialized medicine” is an inherently undesirable end point (slipperly slopes are not generally considered to carry us toward good things); 2) it conflates a Canadian single-payer system with a more genuinely “socialist” system where the state actually provides health care services, like in the UK; and 3) it implies that Canda and the UK are (or viewers will assume that they are) backward hellholes that no normal person would ever want to take as providing models or ideas for policy in the U.S.