Single-payer advocates cite recent wait time increases in U.S. emergency rooms as yet another reason to embrace government-run health care. Like most of their arguments, this one ignores some very inconvenient facts. It does not explain, for example, why Britain and Canada have serious wait time issues despite their government-controlled systems.

The reality, of course, is that countries with socialized medicine tend to have far longer ER wait times than we have in the U.S. This reality has been confirmed, once again, by the travails of Norwegian ER patients. As Aftenposten reports, Norway’s state-owned hospitals are unable to provide decent service:

State health officials are sounding the sirens themselves over a state of emergency in Norwegian hospitals’ emergency rooms, where patients face lengthy delays, inexperienced doctors and often chaotic organization.

And, like all government-run health care systems, Norwegian health care produces a bumper crop of horror stories, including the following:

In one case, a patient suspected of suffering a stroke was kept waiting six hours and 10 minutes before being treated. In another case, a patient who drifted in and out of consciousness didn’t get treatment for nearly four hours.

These are government-owned hospitals, mind you. No profit motive eating at the the soul of the system. No evil capitalists syphoning off precious resources to pay for fat Cuban cigars. Just plain, old-fashioned bureaucratic ineptitude and inefficiency.

So, I’ll ask the question again: Why should we in the United States base our health care reform project on a model that consistently produces poor results? Doesn’t it make more sense to try something new, like free-market reform?