Cheryl Baxter badly needed her hip replaced. One day she received a call from her doctor’s office asking her to come in. Baxter, not unreasonably, figured she was finally scheduled for surgery and would soon be undergoing the procedure.

Unfortunately, that’s not what would happen.

She was notified at the office that her doctor would no longer be carrying out the surgery. She would need to go back on Canada’s waiting list — yes, the national waiting list — for hip replacement surgery. She’s now been waiting three years for the necessary procedure.

Welcome to a nation with socialized healthcare. Advocates of the public option would have you believe that Canadians are simply able to walk in to an office, have whatever they need done done by highly-trained professionals, and then walk back out without paying the bill. But as this expose from Reason.tv is about to demonstrate, that’s not the case at all.

Canada has far fewer doctors than it needs, you need to receive approval from bureaucrats, people wait on lists for years for necessary procedures…rationing is a major issue. Many Canadians, after waiting so long or seeing that they’ll have to wait endlessly, simply come to the United States to undergo their procedures.

This is the exact system Democrats have talked about implementing in America through their health care reform efforts. You can see Obama outlining the plan for our nation’s health care system here. Watch as he tells a woman that her elderly mother may just have to take a pain pill rather than receiving a pacemaker.

Is this the future we want for our country? A future of rationing, bureaucrats in charge of determining which procedures are cost-effective, a massive shortage of doctors, our parents and grandparents told to take pain pills rather than receive necessary surgery, and our citizens having to wait on lists for years for care? If not, call your senators and representatives and tell them to oppose the so-called “public option”.