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It's my guess that most Americans know the difference between a health insurance company and a doctor's practice.

The rightwing defenders of America's broken health care system at Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR) don't seem to get the distinction though. C

PR, in a series of advertisements that play during CNN news broadcasts lumps the British and Canadian systems together under the misleading rubric "Government-Run Healthcare."

What's wrong with that?

Well, they are right about the British system, doctors there work for the government and the healthcare system is government run. But then they are wrong about Canada, where doctors mostly work for themselves, owning their own practices, not for the government.

So, you see, Canada does not have a "Government-Run Healthcare" system, but a privately run and owned health care system. In Canada, it's the health insurance companies that are owned by the government, not the doctors' practices.

In the Canadian system, often called a single payer system or national health insurance, provincial insurance companies are owned by the provincial governments and tax dollars pay for the insurance.

All Canadians get an insurance card and then they can choose whichever private practice doctor they want, unlike most Americans who are trapped in private insurance scams they get through their employers that force them to choose from a small list of doctors approved by the insurance company.

Most of us have been stuck for decades in this wasteful system in which your doctor is forced to call the insurance company for permission to do practically any procedure.

We often wait on long lists for procedures or are told the insurance company won't cover what we need. The United States is the largest economy in the world, based on per capita gross domestic product, yet our health care system falls far short in practically every measure by international health agencies.

CPR's ads tell a few anecdotal horror stories about people in Britain and Canada who are denied services or put on long waiting lists, but they don't mention that Americans, under our private insurance system, often face the same problems, but that we pay on average 50 percent more than Canadians and Brits for the privilege and we still have nearly 50 million people uninsured.

The Canadians and Brits, who pay substantially less for their health care systems, cover everyone.

And CPR tells only one side of the horror stories. They don't give the other side of the story, so we don't know, for example, in the Canadian cases, whether it was the private doctor or the government insurance that was at fault, and in the British cases, whether the government doctors made decisions based on the fact that the patient was untreatable.

These cases are not compared with similar cases in the United States so we can see whether or not a U.S. doctor would have acted similarly.

So, the next time you see one of these terribly distorted CPRights 'hit pieces' against 'Government-Run Healthcare', just remember that the people of Britain and Canada, according to every poll, are much happier with their British National Health Service and Canadian National Health Insurance Plan, than we Americans are with our private health insurance system in which the big insurance companies tell your doctor how to treat you, and often tell your doctors not to treat you at all.

Sincerely, Chris Driscoll