However, a certain perverse logic explains some of the rationing decisions made by health care bureaucrats north of the 49th parallel.

In Canada, the longer a person waits for a diagnostic test that enables a doctor to definitively diagnose cancer - the longer that person is kept off the politically-sensitive waiting list for cancer treatment - and the better their decrepit and inhumane system looks. Unfortunately, this translates to horror stories like this one from Ontario:

Faced with a four-week wait for a CT scan and a further eight-week wait to have a suspected kidney cancer removed, Greg Ruetz felt he had no choice but to travel to the United States for lifesaving medical treatment.

So the then 57-year-old man from a town outside of Waterloo, Ont., headed to the Cleveland Clinic where doctors quickly diagnosed a cancerous growth on his right kidney, necessitating its removal.

"I think the most important thing is that we got good care," Mr. Ruetz said in a telephone interview from his home in Conestogo. "It was a malignancy. Obviously, if you can't have that treated, it's going to cost you your life."

Finally, advocates of rationed medical care, like Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institute, minimize the agony of Canadian and British patients suffering under their government-run health care system and make misleading comparisons (registration required) of health care systems using life expectancy averages:

Other nations deal with this problem in different ways. Some put hospitals on fixed budgets. Others pay doctors who provide outpatient care flat annual amounts per enrolled patient. In some cases, patients experience longer waiting times. Some nations limit access to high-tech services. And virtually all pay doctors relatively less than Americans do. The result typically is dramatically less surgery, less high-technology medicine and much lower healthcare spending - but not poorer overall health outcomes. The British, for example, live slightly longer than Americans yet spend 40% less per capita on healthcare than we do.

While he's certainly correct in saying that there is dramatically less surgery, technology and spending when health care is rationed by government - he is less than honest about the results. As I wrote in an earlier column:

While it may seem counterintuitive, there is very little correlation between the quality of a health care system and life expectancy averages. Many people die before encountering the health care system. Others would die prematurely regardless of the system - while some would live to a ripe old age anyway. Blacks have shorter life expectancies than whites, hispanics or asians. The black population of Canada is numerically insignificant while black Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population. Japanese females have the longest life-spans of all - regardless of whether they live in Japan or in America - i.e. regardless of the health care system they live under. Thus, a good way for a country to raise the life expectancy average would be to import females of Japanese descent!

No Canadian should walk in Alan Spievak's shoes.

The 54-year-old Alberta man endured excruciating pain -- both physical and emotional -- as he waited two years and two months for surgery to replace both hips.

"You lose your sense of self-worth," said Spievak, who suffered from osteoarthritis. " I thought of going into my garage and starting my car and letting someone else have my spot. It's amazing how dark you can become."

Spievak is now recovering from his Nov. 3 surgery, the pain gone "like somebody turned a light switch on."

[...]

"Patients don't die because they have an arthritic hip or an arthritic knee," said Doug Thomson, CEO of the Canadian Orthopedic Foundation. "That's not to say they don't suffer."