"This is a matter of life and death. I'm not rolling in money, but why wait three months when you can have the PET scan done privately the next day?"

That's the question Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh and Prime Minister Paul Martin can't answer. It was asked, rhetorically, to our reporter Aaron Derfel by a man who had just paid $2,375 to get the diagnostic tests he needed.

He paid the money to a new private clinic, downtown, and his tests were promptly done. Others, unable to pay, are forced to wait for a hospital to provide the same test. The waiting lists are months long because governments will not pay for enough machines or enough staff.

So the federal health minister and prime minister, and other "friends of medicare" are left speechless when common sense asserts itself and a sick man reaches into his own pocket to pay for his own health care - surely just about the most basic of human motivations.

Clinics such as this one are not quite illegal, although federal officials have tried repeatedly to discourage them. In Canada, you are not supposed to use your own money to care for yourself. There's a clear analogy with prohibition: This is so contrary to the public's real interests that nobody enforces it, although many hypocritically praise it.

How best to allocate scarce resources? It's a classic problem. The Canada Health Act and provincial policies discourage allocation by price - the market system - and instead provide for allocation by bureaucratic fiat.

The way this works is that governments set the supply of medical-imaging, and then it's first-come first-served, except for those who know somebody and can jump the queue. And somehow this perversion of common sense is described as "a Canadian value."