Barack Obama has said that the Canadian healthcare system is not an option for Americans. That's probably for the best considering that the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says that their healthcare system is about to "implode." The new president, Dr. Anne Doig admits that patients are getting "less than optimal care" and that changes must be made to the system. She says, "We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize."

But ... saying that the Canadian system is not an option for Americans doesn't mean it ain't so. All nationalized health care systems seem to eventually develop the same very bad traits, and that would include rationing and hideous costs.

If, in fact, the public option is on the way out, we can't let our guard down. Rationing, sub-standard care, long waits and high costs are not limited to systems with government health insurance ... they show up in systems run by government, period. Government-run health care is still very much on the table.

Barack Obama is trying to dispel more of the hideous rumors being spread by all of you right-wing mobsters. Yesterday he tried to convince Americans that he did not support a Canadian-like healthcare system for the United States. He called this debate a "bogeyman" saying, "I don't find Canadians particularly scary, but I guess some of the opponents of reform think that they make a good bogeyman."

We're not saying Canadians are scary ... we're saying their healthcare system is. Then there's Pamela Anderson, but that's another story.

Just last week I posted an article by Scott W. Atlas, "Ten reasons why America's health care system is in better condition than you might suppose." In that article he gives several "scary" statistics on the Canadian healthcare system compared to the United States.

- Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9 percent higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.

- Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate, and colon cancer:

* Nine out of ten middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to fewer than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).

* Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a Pap smear, compared to fewer than 90 percent of Canadians.

* More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a prostatespecific antigen (PSA) test, compared to fewer than one in six Canadians (16 percent).

* Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with fewer than one in twenty Canadians (5 percent).

- Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report "excellent" health (11.7 percent) compared to Canadian seniors (5.8 percent). Conversely, white, young Canadian adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower-income Americans to describe their health as "fair or poor."

- Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long--sometimes more than a year--to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

- People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either "fundamental change" or "complete rebuilding."

- Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the "health care system," more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared with only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).

- Americans have better access to important new technologies such as medical imaging than do patients in Canada or Britain. An overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identify computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade--even as economists and policy makers unfamiliar with actual medical practice decry these techniques as wasteful. The United States has thirty-four CT scanners per million Americans, compared to twelve in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has almost twenty-seven MRI machines per million people compared to about six per million in Canada and Britain.

Fear not, though. Your Dear Leaser says that a Canadian model won't work in the US because our system has already been built around a private-based system. What the hell difference does that make when he has every intention of destroying free-market healthcare in this country? Look .... Understand this now when you can do something about it, or discover it later when you cannot. This is NOT about providing better health care to all Americans. This is NOT about saving money on health care. This is about CONTROL! Nothing less. Obama has been making it perfectly clear as far back as 2003 that he favors a single-payer system. Single-payer is simply a code word for "government."

For those of you who still have doubts ... try to wrap your government-educated minds around this. Single-payer means that there is one entity paying the bills. When all the bills are paid by one entity it is easy to figure out that it will be that entity that will ultimately make the decisions on who will and who will not be paid and what they will and will not be paid for. This isn't rocket surgery.

Sure .. Obama is trying to back off his "single-payer" obsession right now by pushing something called the "public option." This public option will be a government health services payment plan (we really should stop calling this insurance) that will compete directly with all employer and private plans out there. Well ... we can call it competition, but it will be a massacre. How in the world does a private business compete with a government program that can operate from here to the end of time at a loss? Obama and the looters know full well that their "public option" will drive employer-provided and private insurance plans out of business. As Obama his own self has said many times, "It make take time .... Five years, ten years ..." But he knows the goal, and you should pull the blinders off and see what's coming as well.

In the meantime, the looters will continue with their newest tactic of demonizing the insurance companies; trying to paint them as the source of all that is evil in the universe. Many Americans, having been conditioned to do so, will buy right in.

Just the other day we had a story about how the government in Great Britain was going to start paying cancer patients to seek treatment in the private sector. Now we have this story out of Canada where private for-profit (the horror!) clinics are becoming a booming business. While Barack Obama seeks to implement a universal healthcare system like Canada, the Canadians are trying to emulate a system closer to the United States.

This article says, "Facing long waits and substandard care, private clinics are proving that Canadians are willing to pay for treatment." Yep, that's the future of the United States. In fact, under the Canada Health Act, private facilities are not allowed to charge citizens for services that are covered by government insurance. That was until 2005, when a Supreme Court ruling in Quebec ruled that patients facing unreasonable wait times could pay out of pocket for private treatment.

Now you are going to love this. Here is the explanation from the Ontario Health Coalition as to why private clinics are bad for Canadians: "Private clinics don't produce one new doctor, nurse, or specialist. All they do it take the existing ones out of the public system, make wait times longer for everybody else while people who can pay more and more and more money jump the queue for health care services."

This, my friends, is why the left is eventually going to have to forbid you from seeking your own doctor with your own funds. That was Hillary's plan .. it will soon be Obama's.

Back to one of my favorite subjects - the unions. The union representing university workers in Ontario (that would be Canada) has decided that it would be a good idea to ban Israeli professors. Yep. The Canadian Union of Public Employees has decided that it wants to take a stand against the evil Israelis who are attacking innocent Hamas victims. So their solution is to use the power of the union to ban Israeli professors from Ontario universities. The president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees of Ontario says, "In response to an appeal from the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees, we are ready to say Israeli academics should not be on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general." The bombing he is referring to is that of Islamic University in Gaza.

The union apparently has nothing to say about Islamic Hamas terrorist goons stashing rockets and other armaments in the buildings on these university grounds.

This isn't the first time this union has tried to pull something like this. There have been previous attempts to boycott and goods and services from Israel. But I believe this is the first time they have tried to ban professors because they are from Israel.

Imagine if it were the other way around .. and someone tried to ban Muslim professors.

Hey ... now there's an idea ...

That's it, folks. I have decided that we do need to use our tax dollars to bailout the Big Three. And it's because if we don't, Canadians are going to lose jobs. Lord knows we want to keep the Canadians employed ... if not, they could become a threat!

Yeah, right. Moving right along ...

Carleton University is in Ottawa, Canada. At Carleton the students participate in the annul Shinearama fundraiser. This is an annual fundraising event involving students from 65 colleges and universities across Canada. Carleton has been involved for 25 of the 50 years of the Shinearama; but no longer.

The Shinearama, you see, has been raising money for the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. That's not good, at least insofar as the Carleton University Student's Association is concerned. The student association was told that Cystic Fibrosis only affects white people. This meant that the disease was not inclusive enough. So ... Carleton University is out. Now these bright students have figured out that Cystic Fibrosis actually affects some people of color - and they're looking for a way to get out of this mess.

If they hadn't been so politically correct they wouldn't be there in the first place. Idiots.

The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled that airlines must offer a free extra seat to people who are disabled or obese. The policy called "one person, one fare" was upheld by the Supreme Court, despite the airlines' desire to charge more to people who take up more than one seat. What this means is that the government is telling private companies how to run their businesses. The government is making decisions as to how airlines should charge their customers.