WASHINGTON — Throughout the long and divisive debate about health-care reform in the United States, Canada's health-care system has often served as a popular punching bag for both Republicans openly swinging at it and Democrats ducking from any suggestion that Canadian-style reform is in the cards.

It came in for another drubbing this week, just days before a likely vote on a sweeping reform bill this weekend in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This time the attack came from Dick Morris, a renowned political strategist who was once one of Bill Clinton's closest advisers, in an opinion piece entitled "Canada's Healthcare Disaster." The column was published earlier this week in The Hill, a widely read congressional newspaper in Washington, and has since shown up on various political blogs and websites.

In the piece, Morris makes unsubstantiated claims that Canadian doctors are deserting the profession after "more than a decade of public health care with mandatory coverage."

Unions "control the entire health-care process" in Canada, he added. In Manitoba, he wrote, they're to blame for long wait lists since they refuse to allow procedures to be scheduled on nights or weekends.

"The unions are doing to health care in Canada what they have done to education in America - stifling creativity, reinforcing bureaucracy and extending waiting times."

Morris did not respond to requests for an interview on Thursday, but his piece is nothing new in the United States in recent months. It echoes attacks on Canada's health-care system that have come from all quarters: politicians, conservative pundits and even the CEO of Whole Foods, who wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that 830,000 Canadians are waiting to be admitted to hospital or to get treatment.

"I know enough about Canadian care, and I know this bureaucratic, socialized piece of crap they have up there," Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas, told Congress over the summer.

"One in five have to die because they went to socialized medicine."

Another Republican congressman suggested Canada doesn't care about old people.

"Life is precious," Georgia's Paul Broun said. "Some would say: 'Well, she's 85 years of age; we should just let her die.' And that's exactly what's going on in Canada and Great Britain today. They don't have the appreciation of life as we do in our society, evidently."

Chris Sands, a Canada-U.S. relations expert at the Hudson Institute in Washington, said Americans are in a period of great uncertainty about health-care reform, so it's not surprising some are looking north to either understand public health care or to demonize it.

"We're in a time when everyone is throwing out theoretical ideas based on what they think they know, and Canada is the great social experiment, it's a laboratory for reform," he said Thursday.

"The problem is we, as Americans, don't know an awful lot about Canada and so we're vulnerable to the demagoguery. Some of us know Canadians and say: 'Hey, Canadians have done this, and they seem healthy, and so it must work.' But others don't. The important thing is to make sure we're having an accurate and intelligent debate, and sometimes that hasn't been happening."

Morris is a political consultant and Fox News commentator who worked mostly with Republicans before becoming one of Clinton's most trusted advisers.

He was Clinton's campaign manager during the former president's successful bid for re-election in 1996, but Morris's tenure was cut short two months before the vote when it was revealed he'd allowed a prostitute to listen in on conversations he was having with the commander-in-chief.

He's since become a harsh foe of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, writing books critical of them.

Now he's a strategist for the League of American Voters, which is running ads opposing health-care reform. Not surprisingly, his condemnation of the Canadian system was not the first time he'd railed against Obama's health-care reform plans.

"The prudent thing to do is postpone health-care changes until the economy generates some revenues and trims the deficit," Morris wrote in June. "But the socialist in the White House can't do that. He's got to strike while his congressional majority is hot."

In his piece in The Hill this week, Morris wrote that there's a 25 per cent higher incidence of colon cancer in Canada than in the United States. Other estimates have put the difference at closer to 10 per cent.

"And because the leading drugs that we routinely use to treat the malady in the U.S. are banned in Canada because of their high cost, 41 per cent of Canadians who get the cancer die of it, compared with only 32 per cent in the United States," Morris wrote.

He was apparently referring to Erbitux, a colon cancer medication that Bristol-Myers Squibbs refused to sell in Canada because the government board that regulates the cost of patented medicines ruled the price was too high.

In September, the drug company relented and agreed to sell it in Canada at a price lower than it sells in the U.S., where a month of the drug can set a patient back US$10,000.

The United States is the only country in the developed world that lets pharmaceutical countries charge what they want for drugs. Other countries, including Canada, either limit drug prices or the industry's profits.

Morris also wrote that the cancer death rate in Canada is 16 per cent higher than in the United States, blaming it on waiting lists.

"Cancer does not wait for waiting lists to clear," he wrote.

Not surprisingly, Canadian readers commenting on The Hill's website were less than impressed.

"This article is a typical example of ideologically motivated trash coming from the U.S. that leaves most Canadians completely cold," wrote a commenter under the name Chris Malone.

"We are proud of our system and the last thing a very big majority of Canadians (as all polls show) want is a U.S.-style health system. Mr. Morris, why talk incorrectly about other countries when there is plenty to discuss in the U.S.?"