Letters to the Editor:

With this letter I should like to add my enthusiastic assent to Sally C. Pipes’s July 27 column, “Sicko slant irksome even in Canada,” and the gross inaccuracy of Michael Moore’s starry-eyed endorsement of Canadian health care.

My family and I used to spend part of every year in the Maritimes, where we owned a home. Our first-hand experience of the health service in Canada included more than one instance of what would in the United States be designated as malpractice, and the many horror stories we kept hearing from our Canadian friends confirmed our own negative impression of the government health system.

Whenever we would express dismay over the instances of malpractice that they reported to us, they would say, “Well, the doctor shortage in Canada is so dire that we can’t afford to lose any physicians — even ones who [commit] malpractice.”

We had a friend who was in constant severe pain because she needed a knee operation; she was wait-listed for years. Others were equally frustrated over how long they had to wait for treatment. And there’s not much hope of improvement since the Canadian system has for years been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Canadians who had anything more serious than a cold came to the United States for treatment if they could afford to make the trip. Whenever I hear someone like Michael Moore saying that the Canadian health-care system is exemplary and a model for the world, I say, “There’s another person who doesn’t know anything about the Canadian health-care system.”

FRED C. ROBINSON

New Haven