President Obama and congressional Democrats last week took a "first step ... toward government-run health insurance" with the enactment of a law to reauthorize and expand CHIP, but they should consider "Canada's experience" before "proceeding further," Nadeem Esmail, director of Health System Performance Studies at the Fraser Institute, writes in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

He writes, "Health care resources are not unlimited in any country ... and must be rationed either by price or time," and as a result, when "individuals bear no direct responsibility to paying for their care, as in Canada, that care is rationed by waiting." Esmail cites several "constitutional challenges" filed by Canadian patients placed on waiting lists for health care that "share a common goal: to win Canadians the freedom to spend their own money to protect themselves from the inadequacies of the government health insurance system."

According to Esmail, the "experiences of these Canadians -- along with the untold stories of the 750,794 citizens waiting a median of 17.3 weeks from mandatory general-practitioner referrals to treatment in 2008 -- show how miserable things can get when government is put in charge of managing health insurance." He concludes, "Canada's system comes at the cost of pain and suffering for patients who find themselves stuck on waiting lists with nowhere to go," and "Americans can only hope that ... Obama heeds the lessons that can be learned from Canadian hardships" (Esmail, Wall Street Journal, 2/9).

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