This isn’t brain surgery

American supporters of socialized medicine have learned not to call it that, anymore. Instead, they use euphemisms such as “single payer” — as though they seek to hold some giant lottery in which a Yazoo City garage mechanic named Billy Bob Bufus would be selected to reach into his coveralls and pay everybody else’s medical bills for a year.

Early on in his administration, looking for something for the first lady to do, Bill Clinton appointed his wife to head up a giant secret task force to draw up a proposed new nationalized “Health Security Act.” Mrs. Clinton put together a 1,300-page doozy. Under her plan, anyone attempting to “get out of line” and pay cash for faster medical attention could have gone to jail.

That sounds far-fetched, but it’s actually typical of any “one-payer” government medical monopoly. If things in limited supply are not rationed by price, they have to be rationed by bureaucrats.

Stuart Browning is a young filmmaker who has put together a series of short films warning Americans about the dangers of collectivized medicine and the benefits of free markets in health care. One of these films, “A Short Course in Brain Surgery” can be viewed for free in only a few minutes on your home computer, at www.freemarketcure.com/brainsurgery.php. It’s worth the time.

The five-minute short introduces us to a retired Ontario body shop manager named Lindsay McCleith. Mr. McCleith had terrible headaches and suffered a seizure. Both he and his doctor suspected a brain tumor, and asked the Canadian National Health system to schedule the diagnostic test known as an MRI. Mr. McCleith got his appointment — four months away.

He and his wife offered to pay cash to get faster attention. But that’s not allowed in Ontario. (Sound familiar?)

He crossed the border to Buffalo, N.Y., and got his test in four days. Turned out he had a brain tumor the size of a golf ball. Armed with this evidence of the seriousness of his condition, he returned to Canada, seeking quick surgery and reimbursement for his expenses. The Canadian “single-payer” system which American leftists yearn to emulate would do neither.

His doctor estimates Mr. McCleith would have waited eight months for treatment in his home country. Here, the whole process — diagnosis, consultation, surgery — took one month.

Fortunately, he and his wife had enough money to cover the $28,000 cost — though Sandra McCleith says she would have gladly mortgaged her home to pay the bills. “When your life is in danger, you’re desperate,” she says.

That only works if you can get to America, though. No amount of money would have bought them timely treatment in Canada. Even “asking for permission” to go to the United States takes eight months.

Today, Hillary Clinton says she’s “learned her lesson” about proposing socialized medicine.

But one examines her written and spoken record in vain for any declaration that government-enforced collectivism is inherently wrong, in medicine or anywhere else. Instead, we’re left to conclude the “lesson” Sen. Clinton has learned is that it’s wiser to impose socialized medicine incrementally, one small step at a time, rather than be honest and spell out your intentions, handing fans of freedom as fat and juicy a target as her gigantic “Health Security Act.”

Nor is there any indication that her remaining Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, has foresworn this vital plank in the socialists’ century-old roadmap to serfdom, either.