If we follow Canada over the edge and into the abyss of socialized medicine, it won't be because we weren't warned of the consequences:

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: "the father of Quebec medicare." Even this title seems modest; Castonguay's work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in "crisis."

"We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it," says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: "We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice."

Castonguay has been forced to reverse his views because authoritarianism has made such a mess of healthcare in Canada, people enter lotteries to win a doctor's appointment. Fortunately Canadians are still able to cross the border to a free country, where all you have to do to get medical attention is be willing to pay for it. But if Democrats have their way, that won't be the case for much longer.

Freedom works. Socialism doesn't work. Yet socialism means more power for the authorities, so we will have to keep fighting it off, no matter how many times it has been exposed as fundamentally dysfunctional.

On a tip from Oiao. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.