Is Colorado ready for yet another round of government-run health care? I know I’m certainly not.

In recent days, a campaign called ColoradoCare launched a ballot initiative for a single-payer health insurance system. It would give the state complete control over our health insurance and health care, basically by eliminating private insurance and making doctors employees of the state.

If this whole scenario is giving you déjà vu, it’s because it should. Colorado has already had a preview of what state-run health care looks like. And, thanks to the Colorado’s insurance exchange, we now know that it’s unaccountable, unreliable, and frankly unaffordable.Colorado has its government-run healthcare halfway house known as the Connect for Health Colorado, our Obamacare sanctioned health exchange. It’s riddled with problems, and yet some in our state now want to replace it with full government control.

It’s a terrible idea. For starters, it would cost taxpayers $25 billion dollars a year, requiring a 10 percent tax on all sources of income—personal included. But the biggest problem is that it would empower bureaucrats at the expense of Coloradans.

Back in 2014, there were concerns that Connect for Health was mismanaging its $177 million in taxpayer-funded start-up money. A full audit was suggested, but the exchange fought tooth and nail to stop it from happening. Aided by sympathetic state senators, they narrowly avoided the audit.

A later audit discovered that the exchange had improperly spent $32 million, including money spent on lobbying to avoid the audit.

What did they have to hide? What was already out in the open was bad enough.

Horror stories came in from people using the exchange who had no idea whether they were covered. This happened in spite of the millions of dollars the exchange paid to “navigators” who were supposed to make signing up for private insurance easier, but only managed to get 8,000 people on board in 2014.

After overrunning its estimates and spending millions on information technology, including a $17.8 million call center, people still encountered glitches. The exchange also started 2015 off needing a cash infusion of $322,000 to help resolve thousands of cases of major technical problems during the enrollment period.

These glitches caused huge disruptions in peoples’ lives. One coverage navigator spent 17 months trying to cancel her policy. She owed a tax bill of over $10,000 for subsidies on the policy she had tried to ditch. Her 18-year-old son even owed $3,613, despite being on Medicaid.

And in typical fashion, the exchange only addressed her concerns after it was learned that she had talked with the media. If a trained insurance “navigator” couldn’t get reliable, sensible, affordable coverage, who could?

Now the exchange is operating at a deficit of $13.3 million dollars going into 2016. The only way it will be able to sustain operations is by raising its user fees. And although these fees will raise $40 million off the backs of Coloradans, that still won’t be enough to pay for the IT support and technology the exchange says it needs going forward.

In other words, an exchange that was supposed to help Coloradans find affordable health insurance is making it even more expensive in a desperate attempt to stay open.

Besides the new fees, more than half of the insurers offering individual plans on Colorado’s exchange are projecting double-digit percentage premium hikes next year. Three major insurers expect increases higher than 20 percent.

This is the result of letting state-appointed bureaucrats manage our health. Replacing this system with a top-down, single-payer system would only give those bureaucrats more responsibilities to mismanage, and waste billions of our hard-earned tax dollars in the process.

A single-payer system may be a fantasy, but we’re still saddled with the unfortunate reality of our failing state exchange. Rather than go further down the path of larger government, our state legislators should fix the problems our exchange has already caused. The lessons of the past year are clear: If we want efficient, effective, and affordable health care, bureaucrats are the last people we should turn to.

Michael Fields is the state director of Americans for Prosperity-Colorado.