NYT's Krugman Conducts Informal Canadian Health Care Poll; Result: 'Bad Move On My Part'

The New York Times' Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and staunch champion of government medicine a la the Canadian model of our neighbors to the north. 

Just this past Saturday in "Toyota, Moving Northward" he flogged the advantages of the single-payer system Canada offers.  He postulated that one reason why the Japanese auto maker is locating it's new RAV4 plant in Ontario is their government medicine:

Canada's other big selling point is its national health insurance system, which saves auto manufacturers large sums in benefit payments compared with their costs in the United States.

Suddenly Krugman the Leftist is all for huge government subsidies for big business. 

Krugman's Nobel-prize winning economic mind then offers up:

So what's the impact on taxpayers? In Canada, there's no impact at all: since all Canadians get government-provided health insurance in any case, the additional auto jobs won't increase government spending.

Really?  Adding workers brought in from outside Canada to the government rolls won't increase government spending?  A little of Krugman's new math: X plus 5,000 still somehow equals X.  

On January 9th, 2008 Krugman defended Canadian (as well as French and British) government medicine from an assessment of it by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in "A health care system to die for."

Rudy Giuliani warned us about what would happen if a Democrat wins:

You have got to see the trap. Otherwise we are in for a disaster. We are in for Canadian health care, French health care, British healthcare.

And that would be a terrible thing:

In "Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis" (Health Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2008), Ellen Nolte, Ph.D., and C. Martin McKee, M.D., D.Sc., both of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, compared international rates of "amenable mortality"-that is, deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care.

The key words being "timely" and "effective" - two words never associated with government medicine.

Just ask Shona Holmes, a Canadian government medicine escapee alive today only because she had an American free market health care system in which to take refuge. The system Krugman wants to see shut down.  The four and six month waits for initial diagnoses of her condition to which Canadian (be) patient care had consigned her would have killed her.

And Ms. Holmes' life-and-death waiting game at the hands of government medicine is the rule rather than the exception.  Most Canadians and Europeans - subject to the system - aren't as fond of it as is Krugman, who isn't.

Something Dr. Krugman could, should he be at all interested, find out with a little due diligence and some rudimentary research. 

Of which he got a taste here with his informal poll.  Oops.