In a valiant effort to stop Canadians storming the borders and leaving their home health care system bereft of their health care dollars, the Canadian government has yielded. It’s made death rate numbers at Canadian hospitals public. The probably futile hope is that Canadian citizens will believe that the competition of transparency will lead to improvements in the current situation in some Canadian hospitals, such as the Scarborough Hospital mentioned in the article, which kills 124 out of every 100 patients admitted.

Now that the Canadian dollar is so strong, buying some 45,000 American Lire to the northern Peso, it’s cheaper for a Canadian to sneak across the border and pay cash for open heart surgery than it is to pay the tax on the Canadian cigarettes that caused the heart disease in the first place.

The combination of renowned treatment from private American hospitals that kill far fewer than 1 in every 1 patient (and sometimes less than that), and the strength of the Northern Peso have now resulted in the desperate situation of empty waiting rooms, and no queues for surgery in America’s northern neighbor.

The collectivist Marxists who run things in Canadian health care from their command center in the bunker of the UBC health care economics department have been horrified at this development. A spokesman who sounded a lot like Morris Barer was (or maybe wasn’t) overheard saying, “it’s our right as Canadian elitists to make the rest of our citizens wait forever for hospital care that will probably kill them if they don’t die waiting in line first. The overwhelming transparency and easily demonstrated quality of the now dirt cheap American health care system is not fair.”

Reports that the WTO was investigating were unconfirmed at time of writing.

Unrepentant free-marketeer Canadian exile David Gratzer was reportedly seen crowing, “See how Adam Smith has kicked those loonies in the ass! The market triumphs again!”

Now can I get a job in the Giuliani administration?