Treating Manitoba patients with a public healthcare monopoly is the equivalent to healing open wounds with leeches. The only difference is that leeches are less likely to cause harm.

The Medicare monopoly is strapped for cash and stretched to the limit. Manitoba spends more money per capita on health care than any other province yet patients still wait in hallways and long queues for medical attention. Nurses and doctors are in short supply and hospitals cannot afford big-ticket items like MRIs. In short, Medicare is a failure and Manitobans deserve better treatment.

The main problem is that the Flat Earth Society is in charge of the system. Reasoned solutions to healthcare challenges are replaced by a blind and unshakable faith in a failed Medicare monopoly. For the pallbearers of healthcare, all roads lead to more funding. That's where the debate begins and ends.

Take for example the brouhaha over a proposed for-profit health clinic to be run by Dr. Mark Godley in Winnipeg. Oh. Did I say "profit" How careless of me. I must have been thinking out loud.

Not unlike mad cow disease, health care profits are banned from Manitoba. After all, they might become contagious. And before you know it, everyone will be making healthcare profits.

Instead of offering up solutions to healthcare problems, the NDP have adopted a bunker mentality and declared war on for-profit solutions. The provincial government has treated Dr. Godley with the contempt of a heretic for challenging the pious orthodoxy of the publicly funded and administered health model.

Godley's heresy is common sense - one commodity in short supply with the NDP. Common sense, not more money, will lead Manitoba out of the healthcare quandary and into the Promised Land of accessible and effective medical treatment.

It's high time NDP policy makers remove their blinders and think outside the box. The issue shouldn't be how to preserve the integrity of Medicare but how to deliver the most effective and accessible treatment to patients. It's about people not ideology.

Let the government regulate and fully fund the healthcare system either directly or through medical savings accounts. But get the bureaucrats and the meddling politicians out of front line medical services.

Entrepreneurs like Godly and other private healthcare workers operating in a competitive business environment can provide more effective, accessible and cost-efficient medical services. Profit is their reward and incentive for improving healthcare services.

But the threat of a good example is what the government fears most. If Godley is successful, private for-profit clinics will multiply like the miracle of fishes and loaves. The government will be forced to retreat and relinquish control to heathen private medical providers.

Worse, Godley's gambit is a direct challenge to the NDP's worldview. The temptation to put its fingers in every pie has been an irresistible tonic for the NDP. Were the party to wean itself off the bosom of the public healthcare monopoly, the NDP might lose its centre of gravity and spin-off into oblivion.

The Manitoba NDP have invested too much stock and identity in public healthcare to allow an ambitious doctor to rain on its parade. But the Chicken Littles in the NDP caucus have little to fear when Godley opens his Winnipeg clinic. Patients will get treatment, healthcare workers will make a living, and the public healthcare system will get some needed relief.