One of the most confusing fallacies the Obama administration managed to get people to swallow was the idea that centralized and socialized provision of healthcare via control of the insurance market was somehow a benefit to society.

But swallow it they did, with the true believers going so far as to suggest that those who opposed the federal government price-controlling the insurance market — and mandating everyone buy either their crappy and inexpensive single option or pay a penalty — were out to kill grandma.

2008-2016 was an absurd time in America.

Thankfully, we’re attempting to move on from that nonsense, even if we have to find creative ways to do it (hello tax reform legislation); and, should we ever feel the urge to look back fondly on single-payer, we have a cautionary tale in the form of England’s National Health Services (NHS) to help correct our thinking.

Because here’s what’s happening within the system that many pointed to as a single-payer healthcare apparatus that worked for the good of the people: after proposals to ban the obese or those who smoke from receiving surgeries (no really, they did that), doubtlessly selling those proposals as necessary for the good of those who are too fat and/or smoke — incentives to get thin and clear the lungs! — the NHS has had to admit that what’s really going on is they’re having to curb costs because the single-payer system can’t afford itself. And it’s reached crisis mode.

Every hospital in the country has been ordered to cancel all non-urgent surgery until at least February in an unprecedented step by NHS officials. The instructions on Tuesday night – which will see result in around 50,000 operations being axed – followed claims by senior doctors that patients were being treated in “third world” conditions, as hospital chief executives warned of the worst winter crisis for three decades. Hospitals are reporting growing chaos, with a spike in winter flu leaving frail patients facing 12-hour waits, and some units running out of corridor space. Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS medical director, on Tuesday ordered NHS trusts to stop taking all but the most urgent cases, closing outpatients clinics for weeks as well as cancelling around 50,000 planned operations. Trusts have also been told they can abandon efforts to house male and female patients in separate wards, in an effort to protect basic safety, as services become overwhelmed…By Tuesday night 12 NHS trusts – including two ambulance services covering almost nine million people – had declared they had reached the maximum state of emergency…

Remember how much your liberal friends laughed at you when you suggested that single-payer might lead to scarcity in the market and how that might lead to “death panels” that decided who was allowed treatment and who wasn’t?

You should email this article to them. And make sure you highlight Guy’s final paragraph:

If liberal Democrats get their way, these scenes will play out across our country, after 156 million Americans are forcibly uprooted from their existing healthcare plans and dumped into the mandatory government system.  Single-payer healthcare would be terribly disruptive and egregiously unaffordable in the United States, crushing medical innovation, achieving worse outcomes, and hugely expanding wait times for treatment — all managed by the sort of unaccountable federal pencil-pushers who were responsible for the (ongoing) VA scandal.  And the people pushing this lose-lose proposition are the same group that lied incessantly about the outcomes and consequences of their most recent government intrusion into the US healthcare system.

This is what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wanted for you, folks. Who are we kidding? They still want it. It remains to be seen if the American people agree.