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Via Dr. B's Finest Kind Medical Clinic and Fish Market, Mark Steyn writes:

"After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene -- by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number. Unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to "old age" or some such and then "lose" the relevant medical records."

Swipe, swipe.

Maybe so, but (a) bullshit (if you'll pardon the term in this context) -- try not to be so hyperbolic. (b) Why pick on the Vic, Mark? The outbreak was at the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke. And (c), what's this "government hospitals" crap? Like most hospitals in Canada, the CHUS is funded and monitored by government, yes, but so what? Are you saying privately funded, for-profit hospitals are by definition magically better, more hygienic places? 'Cause it ain't necessarily so.

(ETA the final link there.)