As Obamacare is revealed to be a bigger failure than anyone predicted, we can’t expect that liberals who believe that increasing the size and scope of government is always the solution will just give up. Instead, expect them to tout Canada’s government-run system as a solution.

Jason Clemens and Bacchus Barua of the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank that has long documented that country’s health care performance, offer a warning. Not only do the data show that Canada’s single-payer system is among the most expensive in the world, it doesn’t offer value to match:

“The most visible manifestation of Canada’s failing health care system are wait times for health care services. In 2013, Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner. This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.”

This isn’t inevitable, they point out. Switzerland manages “universal” coverage through a mainly free-market system, and its patients wait far less for care. And it isn’t that Canadians are waiting just for especially rare procedures:

“Long wait times in Canada have also been observed for basic diagnostic imaging technologies that Americans take for granted, which are crucial for determining the severity of a patient’s condition. In 2013, the average wait time for an MRI was over two months, while Canadians needing a CT scan waited for almost a month.”

The result, they write: People are dying unnecessarily because they’re trapped in a government-run system. Americans looking to replace Obamacare with something that works should look hard at Canada’s numbers, they write:

“Discussion of the Canadian model is worthy of inclusion in such a debate, but more in terms of ‘what to avoid’ than as a model for reform. The reality of Canadian health care is that it is comparatively expensive and imposes enormous costs on Canadians in the form of waiting for services, and limited access to physicians and medical technology.”