Who was that masked man?

[ok, so the title of this post is an inside joke, and a bad one, plz to ignore that part]

Krugman's latest column, The Waiting Game [that link's broken, try this one], takes on that bugaboo of Socialized Medicine [TM], the loooooong waits for elective surgery in those other countries. You have to wait, like forevah dude, for a hip replacement in Canada, but you can get one right quick here in The Good Ol USofA.

Here's why we're quicker:

On the other hand, it’s true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there’s a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.

That’s right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding — end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.