If the U.S. passes Obamacare, where will Canada send their preemies?

That’s a damn fine question, from Jim Hoft’s latest column.

First, some excerpts from the story he cited:

A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don’t have passports.

Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph’s Hospital, 14 weeks premature.

A province wide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two pound, four ounce baby to Buffalo.

Now some Hoft:

This was not an isolated incident. Hamilton’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is closed to new admissions about 50 per cent of the time. The rest of the special needs babies are sent elsewhere and often to the United States

…In fact, there were at least 40 mothers or their babies who were airlifted from British Columbia to the United States in 2007 because Canadian hospitals didn’t have room for the preemies in their neonatal units.

Neonatal intensive care. That means these babies are dead babies, unless they find an open bed. Canada didn’t have them, the U.S. did. Let’s all take just a moment to ask ourselves why.