Canada's single-payer health care system is making news on both sides of the border. In the United States, influential Americans in politics, media and academia call for the United States to adopt a Canadian style, government-financed health care system. A few hundred miles north, Canadian patients are making news by petitioning their courts for the right to opt out of theirs.

As a Canadian transplanted to the United States, I urge my American neighbors to listen to the Canadian patients, not the American advocates. The Canadian health care system provides a poor model for the United States. Rather it serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when a single payer, the government, is put in charge of a large and critical system.

Incentives drive any system, and the incentives of a government-financed health care system are contrary to the best interests of patients. In a multipayer system, patients produce revenues for the institutions that treat them. As a result, they are courted and welcomed. In a system of bureaucratically set global budgets, patients are cost centers, drains on resources and thus must be rationed.

Nothing is free, not even health care in Canada. The issue is who bears the costs and how. In Canada, politicians control the monetary costs that show up on bureaucratic budgets by shifting costs to individuals who pay in the forms of increased pain, lost income and diminished quality of life.

Consider the Canadian Supreme Court's new ruling that Canadians who live in Quebec have the right to purchase private insurance. George Zeliotis, a co-plaintiff in the case with Dr. Jacques Chaoulli, had to wait a year to have his hip replaced. While his wait saved the government money, he argued that it cost him plenty in pain and endangered his life.

Last year, more than 800,000 Canadians, 2.5 percent of the population, were waiting for health procedures. The average wait to see a specialist, according to the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, is nearly 10 weeks. The institute pegs the estimated cost to these patients at $2.2 billion, or roughly $2,700 a person.

The problems plaguing Canada's health care system -- long lines, lack of access to technology and dwindling doctor supply -- are unavoidable in a single payer system. Consider the lack of technology. Since procedures are "free," investing in technology merely costs the government money. Government officials have a strong incentive to underinvest in advanced technology, and they do.

Canada ranks 20th of 25 industrialized countries in the number of MRI machines. It ranks 16th of 25 for CT scans, and 8th of 22 for access to radiation therapy machines. As for the relatively new Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scans, at least one province flat-out refuses to invest in them.

Although touted by U.S. admirers as cost effective, the Canadian system is not inexpensive, it's merely cheap. Financed through heavy taxes, the average Canadian spends $7,350 a year to support the system. Yet for all this spending, Canadians are increasingly discovering they can't even get an appointment with a family physician. "It's like winning the lottery to get in and see the doctor," grouses Whitby, Ontario, Mayor Marcel Brunelle. Only 63 family doctors serve Whitby's 110,000 residents. According to a recent poll, 4.2 million Canadians are without a primary care physician.

The Canadian health care system provides yet another vindication of the insight that in socialistic systems, everything is free yet nothing is available. Or as two Supreme Court justices noted in last week's opinion, "access to a waiting list is not access to health care."