Northern Exposure: Canadians Shower Clinton With Cash At A "Free' Hospital.(A)(BRAIN TRUST)

Byline: Sally C. Pipes

Bill Clinton travels to Canada Wednesday to deliver a keynote address at St. Joseph's Hospital in Toronto, where he will be ideally positioned to understand why his attempt to impose government-controlled healthcare on Americans was misguided.

Two years ago, St. Joseph's bore a huge banner announcing, "Magnetic Resonance Imaging is Coming Summer 1999." It was as if a department store had featured a billboard announcing that laptop computers would soon be available.

Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, is an invaluable medical tool that has been widely available for more than 15 years in the U.S. Yet our brethren in the great white north still sign up on long waiting lists for this, as well as other, necessary medical procedures.

In Toronto, a city of more than 4 million, an MRI requires an average wait of 10.6 weeks. Would our former president tolerate such a wait for anything? Mycat got her MRI in San Francisco on the very day she needed it. My mother, whostill lives in Canada, spent six months on a list and never received one.

Health care queues are virtually unknown in the U.S. and it comes as no surprise that those denied treatment in Canada use the U.S. as a safety valve. This is true not just of border cities like Buffalo, N.Y. Canadian patients regularly turn up as far south as San Diego.

And Canadian doctors -- tired of a system that has turned them into government workers, hamstrings them with regulations, limits their income and makes it difficult for them to access new technology -- are following their patients to the U.S.