It is easy to identify Canadian health care academics when they step into the room - they all wear "haloes"

This diagram was inspired by a famous health care academic who called me a "prostitute" because I had a number of private sector clients. It is not unusual for persons working in the "not-for-profit" part of Canadian health care to refer to persons working in the "for-profit" health system as "prostitutes."

In this particular instance the eminent scholar qualified his comments by saying that I was a "nice prostitute" the real "hard-core prostitutes" were his colleagues in academia who sell their services to pharmaceutical companies.

A major difference between America and Canada is that in America it is the last person to make a sale that is close to God. It is this lack of the opportunity for innovation in service delivery, and any practical reward for innovation, that limits health services advancement in Canada. Only the academics get reward in the Canadian system. In addition to the reward they get from the publication of their ideas, increasingly, with the increasing demise of public funding, and in support of their personal lifestyles, they are marketing their status to pharmaceutical companies.