It’s that special time of year again – no, not Christmas, but open enrollment, when our thoughts turn again to the eternal, and apparently insoluble, problem of rising health care costs.

Now the problem itself seems to coincide strongly with the advent of government in medical expenses. State Sen. Jim Smallwood reminds us, in an op-ed published in the Gazette last week, that Colorado’s government took a bold step last year to inject itself into the health insurance market with the much ballyhooed “Colorado Option,” which established a public, government-run health insurance plan and demanded that private insurance carriers reduce their premiums, just like that, by 5% a year over three years. The idea, as it was presented, was that a public insurance option would inject competition, and we all know competition is good for lowering prices, and if that didn’t work – well, it required that prices be lowered anyway.

Sen. Smallwood, being something of an economist, had some questions and concerns about all this at the time, and he reiterated those in his column. Jim is not a man to say “I told you so,” so I’ll say it for him: far from reducing the cost of health insurance in the state, the Colorado Option has made the problem worse, evidenced by a 10% increase in small group health plan premiums, and a 7 percent-and-change increase in premiums for the individual market. He told you so.

It is not difficult to figure out what happened. Rate setting in the health insurance market is no more effective than price setting in any other market. Artificially mandating rates to be lower does not magically make medical care cost less, it merely shuffles the cost around. And if those costs get shuffled to where an insurer cannot recover them, that insurer will start looking for an exit. That is precisely what happened in Colorado, with several health insurance companies leaving the state in the past few months. So much for “increasing competition.”

The State’s Department of Insurance responded to this in the least helpful way possible. What they did was institute a program euphemistically called “mapping,” ostensibly an elaborate data-driven scheme to discover the “best” of the few remaining health insurance plans for people based on where they live and directing them conveniently there. In a stroke of grand cosmic coincidence, the “suggested plan” – which pops up front and center on your computer screen and requires only two clicks and PRESTO! you are enrolled – happens, almost invariably, to be the Colorado Option plan, whether or not it is the least expensive plan available (spoiler: it usually isn’t).

Ah, but say you are a savvy purchaser of health insurance who chooses to shop around, and are not so easily drawn by the click-bait of the “suggested plan?” Well, the state’s website will begrudgingly let you do so, but first you must go through a full financial application (despite already being pre-qualified), and wind yourself through a labyrinth of web pages and questions and forms. The less gullible among us might interpret that to be a way for the Division of Insurance to drive enrollment in the Colorado Option, which otherwise most consumers would avoid like an expensive hornet’s nest.

Believe it or not, it actually gets worse. Remember all those health insurance companies that left Colorado? Given that the pool was already rather small, there is a pretty good chance that your carrier was among them. Yet nowhere on the state health exchange website does it mention anything like “your current carrier is no longer active in the state. Be aware you need to find a new carrier and a new plan.” See, that is the sort of information that would be rather helpful to a consumer. Instead, one finds simply the super-convenient 2-click “Suggested Plan” leading you by the hand to the Colorado Option. Incidentally, if you happen to live in the Denver Metro Area and this happens to you, there is a high likelihood that that the new “suggested plan” you are spoon-fed comes with a whole new network, requiring different doctors, a different office and different pharmacy.

It is not a stretch of logic to conclude that perhaps this entire government-created insurance mess is a deliberate attempt to smuggle a single-payer health system past a rightly-suspicious voting public. On the other hand, the key lesson here is that consumers ought to take it upon themselves to shop for health plans, rather than just click; the extra time could save a great deal of money and frustration.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.