One of the biggest talking points the GOP makes when talking about universal health care is that it will increase our waiting time for emergency services. Well it looks like that is already happening.

Patients are waiting longer for care in the nation’s emergency rooms, a potentially deadly result of the shrinking number of emergency departments and rising demand for emergency services, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School.

Half of all emergency room patients waited 30 minutes or more before being examined by a doctor in 2004, a 36 percent increase from a median wait time of 22 minutes in 1997, according to the study, published today in the journal Health Affairs.

Of course there has been other talking points of how we would be like other countries with a universal health care system. Take this from Rudy:

You have got to see the trap. Otherwise we are in for a disaster. We are in for Canadian health care, French health care, British health care.

Paul Krugman blogged about this last week and included this graph:

The explanation of “amenable mortality” is as follows:

“amenable mortality”—that is, deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care.

Yeah the French healthcare doesn’t look so bad – does it?