Determined Exhibitionist Repeatedly Moons Canadian Morning Show

Quebec introduces carbon tax, Canada CEOs urge more

Quebec introduces carbon tax, Canada CEOs urge more
Mon Oct 1, 2007 6:39 PM BST
TORONTO, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Quebec province slapped the country’s first carbon tax on energy firms on Monday, as Canadian business leaders urged “environmental taxation” to rein in greenhouse-gas emissions.
The tax, proposed more than a year ago, is expected to raise C$200 million ($202 million) a year to fund the province’s plans to reduce emissions.
It includes a per-litre levy of 0.8 Canadian cent for gasoline, 0.9 Canadian cent for diesel fuel, 0.96 Canadian cent for light heating oil, and C$8 a tonne for coal.
It wasn’t immediately known whether the oil companies, including Petro-Canada (PCA.TO: Quote, Profile , Research) and Imperial Oil (IMO.TO: Quote, Profile , Research), would pass along the cost to consumers.
Separately, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives said Canada should become “an energy and environmental superpower,” and suggested higher energy prices to help cut emissions, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported on Monday.
Since 1990, greenhouse-gas emissions in Canada, a net exporter of energy, have risen more than in any other leading industrialized country, data submitted by the Group of Eight rich nations to the U.N.’s Climate Change Secretariat shows.
Quebec has pledged to meet its targets under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
Canada has signed on to the agreement, which calls for a 6-percent cut in emissions from 1990 levels by 2012, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said that target is impossible to achieve.
Instead, the minority Conservative government aims to cut emissions from greenhouse gases — the key contributor to climate change — by 20 percent from current levels by 2020.

http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=oilRpt&storyID=2007-10-01T173902Z_01_N01295303_RTRIDST_0_CANADA-QUEBEC-TAX.XML

Canadian Liberal Member of Parliment Came to U.S. for Cancer Treatment Despite Canada’s Universal Healthcare

Stronach went to U.S. for cancer treatment: report
Updated Fri. Sep. 14 2007 7:57 AM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, who is battling breast cancer, travelled to California last June for an operation that was recommended as part of her treatment, says a report.
Stronach’s spokesman, Greg MacEachern, told the Toronto Star that the MP for Newmarket-Aurora had a “later-stage” operation in the U.S. after a Toronto doctor referred her.
“Belinda had one of her later-stage operations in California, after referral from her personal physicians in Toronto. Prior to this, Belinda had surgery and treatment in Toronto, and continues to receive follow-up treatment there,” said MacEachern.
He said speed was not the reason why she went to California.
Instead, MacEachern said the decision was made because the U.S. hospital was the best place to have it done due to the type of surgery required.
Stronach was diagnosed last spring with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). The cancer is one of the more treatable forms but Stronach still required a mastectomy — which was done in Toronto — and breast reconstruction.
Stronach, who announced last April she would be leaving politics before the next election, paid for the surgery in the U.S., reports the Star.
“As we said back in June when we confirmed the surgery, this is a personal and private matter between Belinda, her family and her physicians. I think you’ll understand that because of respect for Belinda’s privacy, we refrained from offering specific details around her medical treatment,” said MacEachern.
While it is rare for MPs to seek treatment outside Canada, MacEachern said Stronach was not lacking confidence in the system.
“In fact, Belinda thinks very highly of the Canadian health-care system, and uses it when needed for herself and her children, as do all Canadians. As well, her family has clearly demonstrated that support,” MacEachern told the Star.
MacEachern did not offer any other details regarding what type of surgery Stronach had or what she paid for it.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070914/belinda_Stronach_070914/20070914?hub=Health

Video: Canada’s elections board catches niqab fee-vah!

Video: Canada’s elections board catches niqab fee-vah!
posted at 9:55 am on September 11, 2007 by Allahpundit Send to a Friend printer-friendly
Note what’s said near the end about how even Muslims think this stupid. That’s the second time in two weeks that some western institution, a government agency in this case and a prominent newspaper in the other, pre-emptively “accommodated” Islamic sensibilities that no one asked them to accommodate. The word “dhimmitude” is overused, but if the shoe fits…
The head of the elections board wonders: if we allow absentee ballots, why not this?

Congress tells Bush: Back off SPP agenda

Congress tells Bush: Back off SPP agenda

Lawmakers’ letter warns ’stealth’ effort to ‘harmonize’ could undermine security

Posted: August 17, 20075:00 p.m. Eastern
By Jerome R. Corsi© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
Twenty-two members of the U.S. House of Representatives – 21 Republicans and a Democrat – are urging President Bush to back off his North American integration efforts when he attends the third summit meeting on the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America next week in Montebello, Quebec.
They make it clear that continuing any such agenda at this point would be disregarding growing apprehension in Congress about the plans.
“As you travel to Montebello, Canada later this month for a summit with your Canadian and Mexican counterparts, we want you to be aware of serious and growing concerns in the U.S. Congress about the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) you launched with these nations in 2005,” the letter said.
While the letter authors express their support for the president’s “desire to promote good relations with our neighbors to the north and south,” they are worried about the secretive manner in which SPP is being conducted and concerned it “may actually undermine our security and sovereignty.”
“For instance,” the letter said, “measures that would make it easier to move goods and people across borders could have the effect of further weakening this country’s ability to secure its frontiers and prevent illegal immigration.”
The letter also cited documents obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act Request that suggest, “Such secretiveness seems not to be accidental.”
WND was among the first news organizations to obtain and publish the agenda and the list of attendees for a secret North American Forum meeting held at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, Canada, from September 12-14, 2006. The meeting was closed to the press and the documents obtained by WND were marked “Internal Document, Not for Public Release.”
President Bush with then-Mexico President Vicente Fox, left, and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in March 2005 at the inaugural summit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (White House photo)
Judicial Watch also used a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a set of notes from the Pentagon attendees at the secret Banff meeting.
One particularly disturbing comment was noted in the official conference record of the speeches given, as recorded in the “Rapporteur Notes” obtained by the Judicial Watch FOIA request. In Section VI of the conference, entitled “Border Infrastructure and Continental Prosperity,” the reporter summarized as follows:
To what degree does the concept of North America help/hinder solving problems between the three countries?
Vision is helpful
A secure perimeter would bring enormous benefit
While a vision is appealing working on the infrastructure might yield more benefit and bring more people on board (“evolution by stealth”)
Reflecting on those perceptions, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “It is not encouraging to see the phrase ‘evolution by stealth’ in reference to important policy debates such as North American integration and cooperation. These documents provide more information to Americans concerned about the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The more transparency the better.”
The members also noted in their letter the amendment added by Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., to the transportation funding bill.
As WND reported, Hunter successfully offered an amendment to H.R.3074, the Transportation Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2008, prohibiting the use of federal funds to participate in SPP-related working group meetings in the future.
The members noted in their letter that, “This vote is an indication of the serious concerns felt by those of us in Congress and by our constituents about this initiative – concerns that will only be intensified if pursuit of the SPP continues out of public view and without congressional oversight or approval.”
The last paragraph of the letter called upon the president “not to pledge or agree to any further movement in connection with the SPP at the upcoming North American summit.”
The letter concluded that, “in the interest of transparency and accountability, we urge you to bring to the Congress whatever provisions have already been agreed upon and those now being pursued or contemplated as part of this initiative, for the purpose of obtaining authorization through the normal legislative process.”
Signatories to the letter included the following members of the House of Representatives:
Rep. Terry Everett, R-Alabama
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-California
Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado
Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas
Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kansas
Rep. Walter Jones, R-North Carolina
Rep. David Davis, R-Tenn.
Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Georgia
Rep. John Boozman, R-Arkansas
Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn.
Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Virginia
Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia
Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Florida
Rep. Sue Myrick, R-North Carolina
Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Alabama
Rep. Gary Miller, R-Calif.
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Oregon
Rep. Michael Rogers, R-Alabama
Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Michigan
Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Alabama
Rep. Todd Akin, R-Missouri

108,000 sign petition against SPP summmit

108,000 sign petition against SPP summmit

Opposition growing to quiet moves to integrate U.S., Mexico, Canada
Posted: August 16, 20071:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
A petition opposing the controversial continental integration initiative supported by the Bush administration, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, has garnered 108,000 signatures after less than a week.
Grassfire.org says response to the petition has far exceeded expectations.
“The response is overwhelming,” Steve Elliott, president of Grassfire.org, told WND. “The petition has been up on the website for less than a week and we have been getting as many as 500 signatures an hour.”
President Bush with then-Mexico President Vicente Fox, left, and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in March 2005 at the inaugural summit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (White House photo)
Elliott originally had a target of 100,000 signatures before the start of next week’s SPP meeting in Canada.
As WND has reported, President Bush will interrupt his vacation in Crawford, Texas, next week to attend the SPP’s third summit meeting Aug. 20 and 21 in Montebello, Quebec, at the five-star Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello resort.
Bush will meet with Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon and Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
“Our team leaders have been urging us to launch a petition against the SPP,” Elliott explained. “As we looked into the issue, we decided that this is an emergency issue that Americans need to address.”
Elliott says he gets asked all the time why President Bush has not secured U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, even though the U.S. is six years into a war on terror.
“The explanation is SPP,” Elliott said. “When the Security and Prosperity Partnership was declared at the first summit with Mexico and Canada in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005, President Bush evidently agreed to open our borders with Mexico and Canada, even though that was never clearly explained to the American people.”
Elliott said the petition is designed to let Bush know “the American people are not happy with his aggressive move toward a North American Union that would integrate the United States with Mexico and Canada.”
The Grassfire explains the petition is designed to oppose developments to build a North American “framework,” including on-going SPP trilateral working group meetings, structuring NAFTA Superhighways from the existing interstate highway system and encouraging the open borders “migration” within the three countries.
Grassfire introduces the citizen petition with a two-part audio interview with WND staff reporter Jerome R. Corsi.
Corsi is the author of the current New York Times bestseller, “The Late Great U.S.A.: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada,” published by WND Books.
The Grassfire citizen petition states, “I am signing this petition stating my opposition to efforts that lead to the development and formation of a North American Union combining the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Such a ‘union’ is a direct threat to U.S. sovereignty, national security and economic stability.”
The petition makes four statements:
SPP: I oppose the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) – a trilateral arrangement formed without congressional oversight designed to create regulatory, economic and other institutional structures that facilitate economic, legal and political integration between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Border Security: I oppose proposed regulatory and border security changes that eliminate or reduce U.S. border controls and encourage open migration within a common U.S.-Mexico-Canada region.
NAFTA Highway: I oppose the construction of the NAFTA Superhighway system and other measures designed to create a borderless, open transit system within North America.
Congressional Oversight: I am deeply concerned that the SPP has not been subject to congressional oversight or approval. Any such multi-national agreements must be submitted for congressional approval. As such, I support congressional Resolution 40 which opposes the North American Union and NAFTA Superhighway.
WND has reported Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., has introduced House Concurrent Resolution 40, designed to block moves toward a North American Union and NAFTA Superhighways.
Grassfire intends to present the petition to the White House during the SPP summit in Canada.
“We are fighting an information process,” Elliott told WND. “The Bush administration has been very secretive about SPP. The substantive meetings in Montebello will be held behind closed doors. As the American people learn more about SPP, they are becoming more and more outraged. That’s what we are seeing with this petition.”

The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health Care

The Ugly Truth About Canadian Health CareDavid Gratzer

Socialized medicine has meant rationed care and lack of innovation. Small wonder Canadians are looking to the market.
Mountain-bike enthusiast Suzanne Aucoin had to fight more than her Stage IV colon cancer. Her doctor suggested Erbitux—a proven cancer drug that targets cancer cells exclusively, unlike conventional chemotherapies that more crudely kill all fast-growing cells in the body—and Aucoin went to a clinic to begin treatment. But if Erbitux offered hope, Aucoin’s insurance didn’t: she received one inscrutable form letter after another, rejecting her claim for reimbursement. Yet another example of the callous hand of managed care, depriving someone of needed medical help, right? Guess again. Erbitux is standard treatment, covered by insurance companies—in the United States. Aucoin lives in Ontario, Canada.
When Aucoin appealed to an official ombudsman, the Ontario government claimed that her treatment was unproven and that she had gone to an unaccredited clinic. But the FDA in the U.S. had approved Erbitux, and her clinic was a cancer center affiliated with a prominent Catholic hospital in Buffalo. This January, the ombudsman ruled in Aucoin’s favor, awarding her the cost of treatment. She represents a dramatic new trend in Canadian health-care advocacy: finding the treatment you need in another country, and then fighting Canadian bureaucrats (and often suing) to get them to pick up the tab.
But if Canadians are looking to the United States for the care they need, Americans, ironically, are increasingly looking north for a viable health-care model. There’s no question that American health care, a mixture of private insurance and public programs, is a mess. Over the last five years, health-insurance premiums have more than doubled, leaving firms like General Motors on the brink of bankruptcy. Expensive health care has also hit workers in the pocketbook: it’s one of the reasons that median family income fell between 2000 and 2005 (despite a rise in overall labor costs). Health spending has surged past 16 percent of GDP. The number of uninsured Americans has risen, and even the insured seem dissatisfied. So it’s not surprising that some Americans think that solving the nation’s health-care woes may require adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system, in which the government finances and provides the care. Canadians, the seductive single-payer tune goes, not only spend less on health care; their health outcomes are better, too—life expectancy is longer, infant mortality lower.
Thus, Paul Krugman in the New York Times: “Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? Well, yes.” Politicians like Hillary Clinton are on board; Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko celebrates the virtues of Canada’s socialized health care; the National Coalition on Health Care, which includes big businesses like AT&T, recently endorsed a scheme to centralize major health decisions to a government committee; and big unions are questioning the tenets of employer-sponsored health insurance. Some are tempted. Not me.
I was once a believer in socialized medicine. I don’t want to overstate my case: growing up in Canada, I didn’t spend much time contemplating the nuances of health economics. I wanted to get into medical school—my mind brimmed with statistics on MCAT scores and admissions rates, not health spending. But as a Canadian, I had soaked up three things from my environment: a love of ice hockey; an ability to convert Celsius into Fahrenheit in my head; and the belief that government-run health care was truly compassionate. What I knew about American health care was unappealing: high expenses and lots of uninsured people. When HillaryCare shook Washington, I remember thinking that the Clintonistas were right.
My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care. I soon discovered that the problems went well beyond overcrowded ERs. Patients had to wait for practically any diagnostic test or procedure, such as the man with persistent pain from a hernia operation whom we referred to a pain clinic—with a three-year wait list; or the woman needing a sleep study to diagnose what seemed like sleep apnea, who faced a two-year delay; or the woman with breast cancer who needed to wait four months for radiation therapy, when the standard of care was four weeks.
I decided to write about what I saw. By day, I attended classes and visited patients; at night, I worked on a book. Unfortunately, statistics on Canadian health care’s weaknesses were hard to come by, and even finding people willing to criticize the system was difficult, such was the emotional support that it then enjoyed. One family friend, diagnosed with cancer, was told to wait for potentially lifesaving chemotherapy. I called to see if I could write about his plight. Worried about repercussions, he asked me to change his name. A bit later, he asked if I could change his sex in the story, and maybe his town. Finally, he asked if I could change the illness, too.
My book’s thesis was simple: to contain rising costs, government-run health-care systems invariably restrict the health-care supply. Thus, at a time when Canada’s population was aging and needed more care, not less, cost-crunching bureaucrats had reduced the size of medical school classes, shuttered hospitals, and capped physician fees, resulting in hundreds of thousands of patients waiting for needed treatment—patients who suffered and, in some cases, died from the delays. The only solution, I concluded, was to move away from government command-and-control structures and toward a more market-oriented system. To capture Canadian health care’s growing crisis, I called my book Code Blue, the term used when a patient’s heart stops and hospital staff must leap into action to save him. Though I had a hard time finding a Canadian publisher, the book eventually came out in 1999 from a small imprint; it struck a nerve, going through five printings.
Nor were the problems I identified unique to Canada—they characterized all government-run health-care systems. Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled—48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care, with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. A while back, I toured a public hospital in Washington, D.C., with Tim Evans, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe. The hospital was dark and dingy, but Evans observed that it was cleaner than anything in his native England. In France, the supply of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave—when many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity—15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs aren’t available. And so on.
But single-payer systems—confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting lists, and substandard treatment—are starting to crack. Today my book wouldn’t seem so provocative to Canadians, whose views on public health care are much less rosy than they were even a few years ago. Canadian newspapers are now filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays for care:
vow broken on cancer wait times: most hospitals across canada fail to meet ottawa’s four-week guideline for radiation patients wait as p.e.t. scans used in animal experiments back patients waiting years for treatment: study the doctor is . . . out
As if a taboo had lifted, government statistics on the health-care system’s problems are suddenly available. In fact, government researchers have provided the best data on the doctor shortage, noting, for example, that more than 1.5 million Ontarians (or 12 percent of that province’s population) can’t find family physicians. Health officials in one Nova Scotia community actually resorted to a lottery to determine who’d get a doctor’s appointment.
Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is at the center of this changing health-care scene. Standing at about five and a half feet and soft-spoken, he doesn’t seem imposing. But this accidental revolutionary has turned Canadian health care on its head. In the 1990s, recognizing the growing crisis of socialized care, Chaoulli organized a private Quebec practice—patients called him, he made house calls, and then he directly billed his patients. The local health board cried foul and began fining him. The legal status of private practice in Canada remained murky, but billing patients, rather than the government, was certainly illegal, and so was private insurance.
Chaoulli gave up his private practice but not the fight for private medicine. Trying to draw attention to Canada’s need for an alternative to government care, he began a hunger strike but quit after a month, famished but not famous. He wrote a couple of books on the topic, which sold dismally. He then came up with the idea of challenging the government in court. Because the lawyers whom he consulted dismissed the idea, he decided to make the legal case himself and enrolled in law school. He flunked out after a term. Undeterred, he found a sponsor for his legal fight (his father-in-law, who lives in Japan) and a patient to represent. Chaoulli went to court and lost. He appealed and lost again. He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. And there—amazingly—he won.
Chaoulli was representing George Zeliotis, an elderly Montrealer forced to wait almost a year for a hip replacement. Zeliotis was in agony and taking high doses of opiates. Chaoulli maintained that the patient should have the right to pay for private health insurance and get treatment sooner. He based his argument on the Canadian equivalent of the Bill of Rights, as well as on the equivalent Quebec charter. The court hedged on the national question, but a majority agreed that Quebec’s charter did implicitly recognize such a right.
It’s hard to overstate the shock of the ruling. It caught the government completely off guard—officials had considered Chaoulli’s case so weak that they hadn’t bothered to prepare briefing notes for the prime minister in the event of his victory. The ruling wasn’t just shocking, moreover; it was potentially monumental, opening the way to more private medicine in Quebec. Though the prohibition against private insurance holds in the rest of the country for now, at least two people outside Quebec, armed with Chaoulli’s case as precedent, are taking their demand for private insurance to court.
Rick Baker helps people, and sometimes even saves lives. He describes a man who had a seizure and received a diagnosis of epilepsy. Dissatisfied with the opinion—he had no family history of epilepsy, but he did have constant headaches and nausea, which aren’t usually seen in the disorder—the man requested an MRI. The government told him that the wait would be four and a half months. So he went to Baker, who arranged to have the MRI done within 24 hours—and who, after the test discovered a brain tumor, arranged surgery within a few weeks.
Baker isn’t a neurosurgeon or even a doctor. He’s a medical broker, one member of a private sector that is rushing in to address the inadequacies of Canada’s government care. Canadians pay him to set up surgical procedures, diagnostic tests, and specialist consultations, privately and quickly. “I don’t have a medical background. I just have some common sense,” he explains. “I don’t need to be a doctor for what I do. I’m just expediting care.”
He tells me stories of other people whom his British Columbia–based company, Timely Medical Alternatives, has helped—people like the elderly woman who needed vascular surgery for a major artery in her abdomen and was promised prompt care by one of the most senior bureaucrats in the government, who never called back. “Her doctor told her she’s going to die,” Baker remembers. So Timely got her surgery in a couple of days, in Washington State. Then there was the eight-year-old badly in need of a procedure to help correct her deafness. After watching her surgery get bumped three times, her parents called Timely. She’s now back at school, her hearing partly restored. “The father said, ‘Mr. Baker, my wife and I are in agreement that your star shines the brightest in our heaven,’ ” Baker recalls. “I told that story to a government official. He shrugged. He couldn’t fucking care less.”
Not everyone has kind words for Baker. A woman from a union-sponsored health coalition, writing in a local paper, denounced him for “profiting from people’s misery.” When I bring up the comment, he snaps: “I’m profiting from relieving misery.” Some of the services that Baker brokers almost certainly contravene Canadian law, but governments are loath to stop him. “What I am doing could be construed as civil disobedience,” he says. “There comes a time when people need to lead the government.”
Baker isn’t alone: other private-sector health options are blossoming across Canada, and the government is increasingly turning a blind eye to them, too, despite their often uncertain legal status. Private clinics are opening at a rate of about one a week. Companies like MedCan now offer “corporate medicals” that include an array of diagnostic tests and a referral to Johns Hopkins, if necessary. Insurance firms sell critical-illness insurance, giving policyholders a lump-sum payment in the event of a major diagnosis; since such policyholders could, in theory, spend the money on anything they wanted, medical or not, the system doesn’t count as health insurance and is therefore legal. Testifying to the changing nature of Canadian health care, Baker observes that securing prompt care used to mean a trip south. These days, he says, he’s able to get 80 percent of his clients care in Canada, via the private sector.
Another sign of transformation: Canadian doctors, long silent on the health-care system’s problems, are starting to speak up. Last August, they voted Brian Day president of their national association. A former socialist who counts Fidel Castro as a personal acquaintance, Day has nevertheless become perhaps the most vocal critic of Canadian public health care, having opened his own private surgery center as a remedy for long waiting lists and then challenged the government to shut him down. “This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week,” he fumed to the New York Times, “and in which humans can wait two to three years.”
And now even Canadian governments are looking to the private sector to shrink the waiting lists. Day’s clinic, for instance, handles workers’-compensation cases for employees of both public and private corporations. In British Columbia, private clinics perform roughly 80 percent of government-funded diagnostic testing. In Ontario, where fealty to socialized medicine has always been strong, the government recently hired a private firm to staff a rural hospital’s emergency room.
This privatizing trend is reaching Europe, too. Britain’s government-run health care dates back to the 1940s. Yet the Labour Party—which originally created the National Health Service and used to bristle at the suggestion of private medicine, dismissing it as “Americanization”—now openly favors privatization. Sir William Wells, a senior British health official, recently said: “The big trouble with a state monopoly is that it builds in massive inefficiencies and inward-looking culture.” Last year, the private sector provided about 5 percent of Britain’s nonemergency procedures; Labour aims to triple that percentage by 2008. The Labour government also works to voucherize certain surgeries, offering patients a choice of four providers, at least one private. And in a recent move, the government will contract out some primary care services, perhaps to American firms such as UnitedHealth Group and Kaiser Permanente.
Sweden’s government, after the completion of the latest round of privatizations, will be contracting out some 80 percent of Stockholm’s primary care and 40 percent of its total health services, including one of the city’s largest hospitals. Since the fall of Communism, Slovakia has looked to liberalize its state-run system, introducing co-payments and privatizations. And modest market reforms have begun in Germany: increasing co-pays, enhancing insurance competition, and turning state enterprises over to the private sector (within a decade, only a minority of German hospitals will remain under state control). It’s important to note that change in these countries is slow and gradual—market reforms remain controversial. But if the United States was once the exception for viewing a vibrant private sector in health care as essential, it is so no longer.
Yet even as Stockholm and Saskatoon are percolating with the ideas of Adam Smith, a growing number of prominent Americans are arguing that socialized health care still provides better results for less money. “Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world,” writes Krugman in the New York Times. “But it isn’t true. We spend far more per person on health care . . . yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.”
One often hears variations on Krugman’s argument—that America lags behind other countries in crude health outcomes. But such outcomes reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, lifestyle, drug use, and cultural values. It pains me as a doctor to say this, but health care is just one factor in health. Americans live 75.3 years on average, fewer than Canadians (77.3) or the French (76.6) or the citizens of any Western European nation save Portugal. Health care influences life expectancy, of course. But a life can end because of a murder, a fall, or a car accident. Such factors aren’t academic—homicide rates in the United States are much higher than in other countries (eight times higher than in France, for instance). In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.
And if we measure a health-care system by how well it serves its sick citizens, American medicine excels. Five-year cancer survival rates bear this out. For leukemia, the American survival rate is almost 50 percent; the European rate is just 35 percent. Esophageal carcinoma: 12 percent in the United States, 6 percent in Europe. The survival rate for prostate cancer is 81.2 percent here, yet 61.7 percent in France and down to 44.3 percent in England—a striking variation.
Like many critics of American health care, though, Krugman argues that the costs are just too high: “In 2002 . . . the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman, and child.” Health-care spending in Canada and Britain, he notes, is a small fraction of that. Again, the picture isn’t quite as clear as he suggests; because the U.S. is so much wealthier than other countries, it isn’t unreasonable for it to spend more on health care. Take America’s high spending on research and development. M. D. Anderson in Texas, a prominent cancer center, spends more on research than Canada does.
That said, American health care is expensive. And Americans aren’t always getting a good deal. In the coming years, with health expenses spiraling up, it will be easy for some—like the zealous legislators in California—to give in to the temptation of socialized medicine. In Washington, there are plenty of old pieces of legislation that like-minded politicians could take off the shelf, dust off, and promote: expanding Medicare to Americans 55 and older, say, or covering all children in Medicaid.
But such initiatives would push the United States further down the path to a government-run system and make things much, much worse. True, government bureaucrats would be able to cut costs—but only by shrinking access to health care, as in Canada, and engendering a Canadian-style nightmare of overflowing emergency rooms and yearlong waits for treatment. America is right to seek a model for delivering good health care at good prices, but we should be looking not to Canada, but close to home—in the other four-fifths or so of our economy. From telecommunications to retail, deregulation and market competition have driven prices down and quality and productivity up. Health care is long overdue for the same prescription.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_canadian_healthcare.html

Liberals Leaving America – The Number of Americans Moving to Canada in 2006 Hit a 30-Year High

O, Canada! More Americans Heading North
The Number of Americans Moving to Canada in 2006 Hit a 30-Year High

By MARCUS BARAMJuly 31, 2007
Blame Canada!
It may seem like a quiet country where not much happens besides ice hockey, curling and beer drinking. But our neighbor to the north is proving to be quite the draw for thousands of disgruntled Americans.
The number of U.S. citizens who moved to Canada last year hit a 30-year high, with a 20 percent increase over the previous year and almost double the number who moved in 2000.
In 2006, 10,942 Americans went to Canada, compared with 9,262 in 2005 and 5,828 in 2000, according to a survey by the Association for Canadian Studies.
Of course, those numbers are still outweighed by the number of Canadians going the other way. Yet, that imbalance is shrinking. Last year, 23,913 Canadians moved to the United States, a significant decrease from 29,930 in 2005.
“There has been a definite increase in the past five years — the number hasn’t exceeded 10,000 since 1977,” says Jack Jedwab, the association’s executive director. “During the mid-70s, Canada admitted between 22,000 and 26,000 Americans a year, most of whom were draft dodgers from the Vietnam War.”
The current increase is fueled largely by social and political reasons, says Jedwab.
“Those who are coming have the highest level of education — these aren’t people who can’t get a job in the states,” he explains. “They’re coming because many of them don’t like the politics, the Iraq War and the security situation in the U.S. By comparison, Canada is a tension-free place. People feel safer.”
One recent immigrant is Tom Kertes, a 34-year-old labor organizer who moved from Seattle to Toronto in April.
Kertes attributes his motivation to President Bush’s opposition to gay marriage, and the tactics employed during the war on terror since 9/11.
“I wanted a country that respected my human rights and the rights of others,” he says. “We joked about it after Bush won re-election, but it took us a while to go through the application.”
Kertes, who moved with his partner, is happy in his new home. “Canada is a really nice country. My mother is thinking about it. My stepfather has diabetes and has health issues. So, he’d be taken care of for free if he moved up here.”
Not that Kertes doesn’t get homesick every once in a while. “I have no intention of giving up my citizenship. I have an American flag at home on the wall — I didn’t have that in Seattle. All of a sudden, I’m a nationalist. On the Fourth of July, I really missed being home.”
Jo Davenport, who wrote “The Canadian Way,” moved from Atlanta to Nova Scotia in December 2001. She also cites political reasons for her move, saying that she disagreed with the Bush administration’s decisions after 9/11.
“Things are totally different here because they care about their people here,” she says, explaining that she’s only been back home once or twice.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3433005&page=1