NDP politicians and lefty interest groups love telling us how private clinics are supposedly more expensive than government-run hospitals.

It's their stock answer when anyone suggests government should contract out more services to the private sector, where doctor and facility fees are still covered under medicare, just like a hospital.

"The evidence is clear," they say. "Studies have shown over and over that private, for-profit clinics cost more."

But when you ask for evidence to support that claim, they never have any.

Take this week's decision by the Doer government to reject the idea of contracting out pediatric dental surgery to private clinics as a way of reducing huge waiting lists.

Rather than putting the work out to tender to see what clinics such as Winnipeg's Maples Surgical Centre could offer, Health Minister Tim Sale announced they would be doing additional procedures under the government system at Misericordia Urgent Care Centre.

Sale claims his department crunched the numbers and found Misericordia could do the work slightly cheaper -- $5 per procedure -- than the Maples Surgical Centre, which recently made a proposal to government on the dental surgeries.

But when asked for the financial analysis to back up the claim, Sale couldn't produce it. The Sun has been asking for the documentation for three days, but Sale's office has not produced it. Probably because it doesn't exist. If Sale had the numbers to prove private clinics cost more, wouldn't he want to share it with the public?

Besides, even if Misericordia could do it for $5 less, government could go back to Maples and probably convince them to drop their price $10 or $20 per procedure -- or more -- if they guaranteed them the 600 procedures a year that Misericordia is supposed to do.

It's called doing business.

Same problem

We had the same problem when the Doer government bought the Pan Am Clinic.

The NDP now claim they're doing hip and knee surgery cheaper there than before they bought it. But they've never been able to produce the financial analysis to prove it.

What they would have to do is look at what it cost government to contract out surgeries when it was still a private clinic and compare it to what it costs now, including amortizing the $7-million capital cost and all other related fixed costs and capital upgrades.

They've never done that. Or at least they've never made that type of analysis public, despite repeated requests.

It sounds good to stand up and say private clinics cost more because the owners must make a profit.

But it ignores the efficiencies of smaller, privately run operations whose price structure is influenced by competitive forces.

If Tim Sale wants to argue that private clinics cost more, he should prove it by releasing the financial analysis.

But I guess he can't release what he doesn't have.

Which only proves that his decision to reject private clinics was based purely on ideological reasons.