Personal stories are a great rhetorical device, especially for the kinds of people that remain skeptical, long after the established facts and statistics are spelled out. Cory Doctorow doesn't necessarily have a compelling story, but because of his prominence in the blogosphere, I thought I'd paste in his bit:

I've lived under the Canadian, US, British and Costa Rican health care systems and of the four, I believe that the Canadian one functions best (I'd rank them Canadian, British, Costa Rican and US). My experience with all four includes routine and urgent care. I've had firsthand experience of pre-and post-natal care in Canada, the US and the UK; I've also seen the Canadian, US and UK palliative care system in action.

(more from Boing Boing)

There's a lot of pages out there about debunking Canadian healthcare myths, and this is another good one. For example, Canadians come to the US for healthcare:

Most patients who come from Canada to the U.S. for health care are those whose costs are covered by the Canadian governments. If a Canadian goes outside of the country to get services that are deemed medically necessary, not experimental, and are not available at home for whatever reason (e.g., shortage or absence of high tech medical equipment; a longer wait for service than is medically prudent; or lack of physician expertise), the provincial government where you live fully funds your care.

(more from the Denver Post)

I recently came on a phrase in an article in the journal "Annals of Internal Medicine" about an axiom of medical economics: a dollar spent on medical care is a dollar of income for someone. I have been reciting this as a mantra ever since. It may be the single most important fact about health care in America that you or I need to know. It means that all of us -- doctors, hospitals, pharmacists, drug companies, nurses, home health agencies, and so many others -- are drinking at the same trough which happens to hold $2.1 trillion, or 16% of our GDP. Every group who feeds at this trough has its lobbyists and has made contributions to Congressional campaigns to try to keep their spot and their share of the grub. Why not? -- it's hog heaven. But reform cannot happen without cutting costs, without turning people away from the trough and having them eat less. If you do that, you have to be prepared for the buzz saw of protest that dissuaded Roosevelt, defeated Truman's plan and scuttled Hillary Clinton's proposal.

(via kottke)

Law 13 of the 48 Laws of Power states: When Asking for Help, Appeal to People's Self-Interest, Never to their Mercy or Gratitude. This is why it's important to emphasize how quality-of-care in America has so much room to grow under healthcare reform. Here's a little snippet about quality-of-care in Canada vs. the US:

On most measures of patient-reported physician quality, Canada comes out slightly ahead of the U.S. The Commonwealth Fund report shows somewhat fewer reported physician errors, lab errors, medication errors and duplicate tests north of the border, and Canadians report more satisfaction with their doctors.

(Read the rest on factcheck.org)

This is an angle that didn't occur to me, but could be really powerful if mentioned on conservative talk shows:

You hear a lot about how small businesses would get crushed by raising taxes on the wealthiest 1%, or how small business will be crushed by excessive regulations, or how small business would be crushed by a carbon tax or cap & trade. But those same people who claim to stand up for small businesses disappear when we're dealing with something that does crush small businesses - the no-win scenario of either letting the employees who feel like your family go without benefits, opting for the "split the baby" solution of getting a high-deductible or high cost-sharing plan that you know will be insufficient, or subjecting to yourself to the slings and arrows of outrageous insurance monopolies, where the only safe prediction is that your costs will go up.

(from the NOW! Blog)

If the status quo, profit-driven healthcare industry was so defensible and great, why do they need spend a third of a billion dollars on campaign contributions?

To enhance their clout, insurers, drug producers and other parts of the health industry have made over $372 million in campaign contributions to lawmakers since 2000, according to a report released Wednesday by Common Cause, the nonpartisan public interest group. Nearly half the total -- $178 million -- has gone to members of House and Senate committees that oversee health programs. They have also spent over $3 billion lobbying, with their annual expenditures growing yearly, the study said.

(read rest of the AP's article, The Influence Game)

Technology issues seem to help sway independents. For example, when Obama delivered a great talk at Google, a few of my entrepreneur fence-sitters started evincing positive feelings toward him. Likewise, here's a easy snippet that can lay things out about the technological inefficiencies of profit-driven healthcare:

Technology Review has some thoughts about why the health care industry has been so slow to adopt IT, while quick to embrace high technology in care and diagnosis. Hypothesis: making medical records available for data analysis might expose redundancy, over-testing, and other methods of extracting profits from the fee-for-service model. My take is that it might also make it much easier to gather and evaluate quality of care information. That would be chum in the water for malpractice suits.

(read rest of the slashdot entry)

In the healthcare debate, often the conversation comes to whether the government can do anything right. Here's an article with a lot of copy-paste-worthy paragraphs that should set the argument straight:

Yet here's a curious fact that few conservatives or liberals know. Who do you think receives higher-quality health care. Medicare patients who are free to pick their own doctors and specialists? Or aging veterans stuck in those presumably filthy VA hospitals with their antiquated equipment, uncaring administrators, and incompetent staff? An answer came in 2003, when the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published a study that compared veterans health facilities on 11 measures of quality with fee-for-service Medicare. On all 11 measures, the quality of care in veterans facilities proved to be "significantly better."

(link to the rest of the Washington Monthly article)

There's many more paragraphs like that in there.

One thing that killed John Kerry's candidacy is the label "European." European. It's like a swear word in American politics. It's a proxy label for effeminate, weak, and socialist. So when it comes to lobbying for healthcare reform in the US, maybe instead of referring to how great things are in Europe (or Canada), how about referring to Australia.

This idea was spurred on by a comment on philosophistry:

Health care doesn't have to be exclusively socialist or "capitalist". The Australian system is a good example. Everyone is provided with free public health care and about 40-50% also have private health insurance. You have the benefit of efficient, effective "capitalist" healthcare, and the safety net of the public system.

I've already copied-and-pasted that twice in the past 24 hours in order to unblock people's obsession with the black-and-white phraseology of "socialist medicine."

Australia is much more appealing to the slow-to-move, silent-majority, conservative America. If we're going to get healthcare reform, we have to make it popular among at least some of the cowboy-types. The ones that associate America with the Marlboro Man. I think Australia somehow has that kind of cred. It's got an expansive landscape and seems very "Wild West." It seems manly.

So let's stop talking about Canada and Europe. And let's start invoking Australia.

While Obama's poll numbers are still overall favorable, we still have to remember that conservatives are the single-largest ideological group. And besides, I want as many Americans to buy into this, rather than just have it forced onto us by the Obama-Pelosi juggernaut.

If you're interested in promoting healthcare reform, copy this paragraph somewhere, then paste it whenever an argument about healthcare reform comes up. Or better yet, start a blog or send an e-mail.

Why is the U.S. healthcare system so expensive? Administrative costs, marketing and profits account for 22 to 31 percent of the U.S. healthcare dollar (I recently heard Edward Kennedy say these costs were 33 percent, but I have not seen documentation of that number). By contrast, overhead costs in single-payer systems (including Medicare) typically are 3 percent.

(via Alternet)