Dressed in OR greens and speaking to an off-screen interviewer, past Canadian Medical Association president Brian Day is being featured in a new million-dollar ad campaign in the United States touting the benefits of competition and privatization in health care.

"Patients are languishing and suffering on wait lists," Day says in the ads. "Our own Supreme Court of Canada has stated that patients are actually dying as they wait for care in Canada."

Day told the Star the clips in the ads are from a half-hour interview he gave for a forthcoming documentary on health care by the same people who put together the ads.

"They've obviously edited them to suit their message," said Day, owner of a private surgery clinic in Vancouver.

In the parts of the interview not shown, Day said he criticized the U.S. system for leaving 47 million people without insurance.

"The U.S. system is a poor model to emulate."

Day said, however, that while incomplete, the ads airing on CNN and Fox News do not misrepresent what he said. In the ads, Day calls Canadian medicare a "dysfunctional system in need of reform."

The ad campaign, sponsored by the Conservative Patients' Rights Action Fund, is aimed at heading off health-care reforms in the U.S. and includes an online component with interviews at facesofgovernmenthealthcare.com and on YouTube.

"Tell Congress you won't trade your doctor for a national board of bureaucrats," Rick Scott, founder of the patients' rights fund, says in another ad. "Let's put patients first."

In the online ads, Day touts privatization and competition as a cure to Canadian health-care woes.

"Privatization introduces that necessary component of competition, of a market that that will influence and be a yardstick for the public system," he tells interviewer Gene Randall, a former CNN and NBC correspondent.

Day served as CMA president for one year until last August. During his term, he pushed what he called a "European" system mixing public and private care, a campaign continued by his successor, Dr. Robert Ouellet.

The ads also feature patients and doctors from Canada and Europe describing their bad experiences with government-run medical care.

The spots inspired anti-privatization activists in Canada to write U.S. President Barack Obama, urging him to ignore the ads in general – and Day in particular.

"Mr. President, we urge you to listen to Canadians, and not to Dr. Day and those who want to introduce more private, for-profit health services into Canada and the United States," reads the letter sent Thursday by Michael McBane of the Canadian Health Coalition.

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McBane's letter also tells Obama that the British Columbia government has accused Day of overbilling at his clinic and that Day "does not represent the values of Canadians."

Day denies any wrongdoing.