On private misdeeds

Oh noes!!! The National Post has uncovered "fraud" in "Canada's health care system"!!! Clearly this proves the need for market discipline, and for private-sector ingenuity, and for...wait, what's this?

The phenomenon is perhaps more rampant, though, under the health insurance plans that many workplaces offer their employees.

In one case, claims filed to a plan indicated that a massage therapist had worked in three different greater Toronto-area cities on the same day, for three or four hours in each place, the insurance company official said. "Apparently, he is a teleporter," she quipped.

Increasingly, plan administrators are seeing ID theft perpetrated by clinics owned by chiropractors, who usurp the identity of other health providers, the investigator said.
...
Ms. Robinson said a simple change by the insurance industry could curb much of the identity theft. Instead of using the professional's registration number — accessible to almost anyone — for billing purposes, companies should assign their own numbers, as provincial medicare agencies do for doctor billings.

So the National Post's headline tailored to build distrust in a public health care system...is linked to an article which actually shows that the problem lies primarily in private-sector mistakes.

Convenient from the standpoint of one of many media outlets that's been attacking the public system at every opportunity. But if the worst anybody can say about universal public health care is that we're leaking money from the parts of our health-care system that aren't as well designed as the ones delivered universally, then that would seem to nicely signal how little basis the free-marketers actually have for their position.