As liberals in Congress prepare to hold the first-ever hearing on single-payer legislation to put the federal government in charge of every health care decision of every American, a Canadian cancer patient’s video pleading for the government to fix the country’s broken single-payer system has gone viral.

From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

“A mother in Nova Scotia living with cancer is challenging Premier Stephen McNeil to meet with her after a years-long battle with the province’s health-care system.

In an emotional video posted to her Facebook page this week, Inez Rudderham said she went undiagnosed for two years because she couldn’t access a family doctor. By the time she was diagnosed, her anal cancer had progressed to its third stage….

Rudderham said she was turned away from emergency departments three times before her concerns were taken seriously…’At 33, I am in menopause because when my tumour was a polyp I did not have access to a family doctor and the ERs wouldn’t help me.’”

Unfortunately, tragic stories like this occur in government-run health care systems across the world. Under the UK’s single-payer system, elderly patients have been left to go blind and cancer patients have lower survival rates than in the United States, thanks in large part to rationing of care.

Bottom line: The costs of single-payer health care go far beyond higher taxes and the loss of private health care plans; the consequences touch real people who have been failed by a broken system run by inept bureaucrats. The long wait times and denial of care common in government-run health care systems reduce patients from individuals whose wellbeing is on the line to problems to be managed and costs to be contained.

This is what’s at stake with the left’s dangerous proposals and all should heed the warning.