CANADIAN CRACKUP COMING?

IT took only one semester for Dr. Jacques Chaoulli to flunk out of a Montreal law school a few years ago after he incessantly challenged professors in the classroom and in exams with his novel legal interpretations. But Dr. Chaoulli, a family physician, never lost his taste for legal argument, or his distaste for Canada's publicly financed health care system. He has taken what was once regarded as a nuisance case, challenging the constitutionality of the system all the way to the Supreme Court - serving as his own lawyer, rolling his cardboard boxes stuffed with files into the chamber and paying for his efforts with a half million dollars out of his own pocket and that of his tolerant Japanese father-in-law.

It has been a year since the Canadian Supreme Court heard the case, a rare delay that is raising eyebrows in legal circles. Scholars studying Dr. Chaoulli's challenge say the court is either badly divided or waiting for the appropriate political moment to release a bombshell. They speculate that the justices may agree outright with Dr. Chaoulli (pronounced cha-OOH-li), or are working out instructions to the government to find a way to fix what many agree is an ailing health care network - where doctors are in short supply and patients wait months for diagnostic tests and elective surgeries like cornea transplants and knee replacements. "If I win, everything will be turned upside down," Dr. Chaoulli said with a smile, sipping a cup of tea in the living room of his modest stone house in Montreal. "One constitutional expert told a friend of mine, 'Chaoulli, is he a crazy man or a genius? We will know after the judgment of the Supreme Court.' "

A diminutive man who has trouble keeping his wire-rim glasses on straight, Dr. Chaoulli, 53, hardly looks like the "freedom fighter" that Canada's conservative news media have called him. But if he wins his case he will tear up the third rail of the nation's politics and raze what many Canadians consider to be the bedrock of their national identity. He argues that regulations that create long waiting times for surgery contradict the constitutional guarantees for individuals of "life, liberty and the security of the person," and that the prohibition against private medical insurance and care is for sick patients an "infringement of the protection against cruel and unusual treatment."

He believes that Canada is disallowing the basic contract rights of doctors and patients, and that the country would serve the sick much better if it had a parallel private health care system, as in France and many other industrialized countries. "His argument is credible," said Patrick Monahan, dean of the Osgoode Hall Law School of York University in Toronto. "The issue of waiting times does raise constitutional issues."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation.

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