The inevitable result of government health care:

HAMILTON — A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don’t have passports.

A provincewide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two pound, four ounce baby to Buffalo.

Her parents Natalie Paquette and Richard Stinson couldn’t follow their child because as of June 1, a passport is required to cross the border into the United States.

Ed links to a Canadian blogger buddy of his, who tries to evade the natural consequences of socialism thusly:

I won’t get into the relative merits of the American and Canadian health-care systems here. Suffice it to say that there obviously need to be more neo-natal intensive care unit beds up here. Thankfully — and this doesn’t mean that the American system is better (after all, at least the couple and their baby are guaranteed care up here, thanks to our public system, even if it’s not perfect) — there was an opening south of the border.

Uh huh. They’re “guaranteed” care, but — oops oops oopsie — couldn’t get it under their system. Which, of course, only proves that our system — y’know, the one these people actually did get care under — is no better.

As Ed notes, this sort of situation is precisely the correct time to get into the “relative merits” of the two systems — in fact, it’s crucial we do, lest we fail to understand that government health care isn’t a means for delivery of care to all, but the establishment of a bureaucracy to oversee rationing of it.

And it damned sure does mean that the US system is better — otherwise, there wouldn’t have been any need to ship the kid here for care in the first place. Despite the fondness of disingenuous or foolish bleeding-heart types who shriek otherwise, critical care is never denied to anyone in the US because of lack of ability to pay — unlike in Canada or other nations with socialized medicine.

Under a government health system, even the mediocre health care you’re guaranteed by your government masters may not be available to you at all. And once the US goes down this dark road, there’ll be no place left to go when your failed system fails you — as it inevitably must.

On the other hand, it’s “free.” And worth every penny, too. As with the rest of the progressivist agenda, it ain’t about lifting anyone up — it’s about dragging everyone down.

Update! More from Darleen:

Stickings evidently didn’t have a grandmother like mine. Among her many hard-headed sayings she liked to quote was “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Canadians have higher incidents of cancer because that national health system rations screening. Canadians have higher death rates from cancer because cancers are treated there with drugs Americans stopped using ten or more years ago.

But the American system is “no better”?

Yeah, it’s crucial to get that bit in every chance you get, lest people start getting the impression that socialism doesn’t work or something. It’s those inconvenient truths that could get in the way of The Great Project.