Hey, remember when those crazy conservatives said government-run health care would lead to helpful drugs being blocked because they would cost too much to provide free of cost to everyone? You know, those crazy conservatives who pointed to such incidents in Europe and Canada. Yeah, turns out those conservatives weren’t so crazy after all.

The Washington Post reports on federal efforts to de-certify breast cancer drug Avastin. Why? It costs too much.

Federal regulators are considering taking the highly unusual step of rescinding approval of a drug that patients with advanced breast cancer turn to as a last-ditch hope.

The debate over Avastin, prescribed to about 17,500 women with breast cancer a year, has become entangled in the politically explosive struggle over medical spending . and effectiveness that flared during the battle over health-care reform: How should the government balance protecting patients and controlling costs without restricting access to cutting-edge, and often costly, treatments? …

The FDA is not supposed to consider costs in its decisions, but if the agency rescinds approval, insurers are likely to stop paying for treatment.

“It’s hard to talk about Avastin without talking about costs,” said Eric P. Winer, director of the Breast Oncology Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “For better or worse, Avastin has become in many ways the poster child of high-priced anti-cancer drugs.”

In fact, the FDA is supposed to be forbidden from considering cost when deciding whether a drug should receive approval. But these are bureaucrats in a federal bureaucracy, so “supposed to” is a laughable statement. They’ll consider cost and then de-certify the effective anti-cancer medication.

Welcome to the new world under government-run health care. Is the anti-cancer drug you’re on working? Is that drug prolonging or even saving your life? Could you very well die without the use of that drug? Oh well. It costs too much so the federal government, your new health care regulator, will stop you from using it.

This is the reality of government-run health care, folks. It’s not compassionate — it’s inhumane and deadly.