David George Gratzer (born September 5, 1974) is a physician, columnist, author, Congressional expert witness; he was a senior fellow at both the Manhattan Institute and the Montreal Economic Institute. Though he has written essays on topics as diverse as obesity and political campaigns, he is best known for his first book, published by ECW Press, when he was just 24: Code Blue: Reviving Canada's Health Care System. That book won the Donner Prize established by the Donner Canadian Foundation and was a national bestseller in his native Canada. Gratzer is a critic of the Canadian health care system, and of U.S. President Barack Obama's health care reform proposals. Gratzer was health care policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign.
Early life
Gratzer born September 5, 1974, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Gratzer's father, George, is a professor of mathematics at the University of Manitoba who emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1963 and to Canada in 1966. Gratzer's mother, Catherine, is a retired dentist. Gratzer's older brother earned his medical degree and now practices in the United States as a psychiatrist.
Gratzer earned a B.Sc. at the University of Manitoba in 1996, was president of the University of Manitoba Students' Union (UMSU) during his final undergraduate year 1995–1996, and was appointed by the Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba to the University of Manitoba Board of Governors for four successive years from 1994 to 1998.
In his early years, Gratzer was not particularly interested in health policy issues. As he noted later:
Medical school and Code Blue (1999) Gratzer attended medical school at the University of Manitoba from 1996 to 2000 and earned an M.D. in 2000. On November 15, 1996, during his first year of medical school, the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) published a letter to the editor from Gratzer criticizing a June 15, 1996 CMAJ report comparing reserve funds held by the Canadian Medical Protective Association (CMPA) to those held by medical malpractice insurers in the United States.
While in medical school, Gratzer was a regular contributor of opinion columns to National Post, wrote a weekly opinion column for the London Free Press and the Halifax Sunday Herald, and wrote columns on health care that appeared in several major newspapers and magazines, including the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen and Calgary Herald. A 1997 Gratzer column "Being a young conservative is nothing to apologize for" said "I am a conservative. This is somewhat unfortunate, as people don't seem to understand how anyone under 40 can be right-wing." A 1999 Gratzer column "Raising the minimum wage hurts the poor it hopes to help" lamented that even "two of Canada's three right-leaning governments have chosen to hike their minimum wages" and that "minimum wage earners are not underpaid but underproductive" Gratzer won $250 as fourth place runner-up in 1998–1999 and won $2,500 as first prize in the 1999–2000 Felix Morley Journalism Competition of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University for his newspaper columns.
During his second year of medical school, Gratzer began writing a book about problems with the Canadian health care system but could not get anyone interested. Rejection letters piled up after he completed the book and he had doubts about his ability to get taken seriously until his third year of medical school, when Robert Lecker, professor of English at McGill University and co-founder of ECW Press agreed to publish his book. In August 1999, during his fourth year of medical school, ECW Press published the 24-year-old Gratzer's first book, Code Blue: Reviving Canada's Health Care System
Gratzer wrote about deficiencies in Canadian health care and argued that they were the direct result of the system's design, and thus not amendable to simple reforms.
Gratzer called for market-based reforms. He won praise from a former Member of Parliament, Stephen Harper, who wrote: "Gratzer proposes a workable solution for the biggest public policy problem of the coming generation—government-controlled health care monopoly… Canada needs Gratzer’s solution." Harper later became the Prime Minister of Canada.
On May 4, 2000, Gratzer was awarded $25,000 by the Donner Canadian Foundation as winner of its second annual Donner Prize for best public policy book of 1999 for Code Blue.