Look, I don't want to get too far afield here.

My position is that there is a large contingent of people who want desperately to convert the United States to a single-payer, socialized medicine system at the Federal level.

I strongly oppose this, not only on moral and political grounds, but on the grounds of effectiveness in getting decent health care to people in the long term.

The rationale for imposing this system on us is that we have a major health care crisis where people cannot get the care they need.

I submit that America's health care system is operating remarkably well considering the massive government and regulatory albatross hanging around its neck, and the fact that much of it is already socialized to some extent.

Every person who desperately needs health care and can't get it is important. I'm not trying to blow that off.

But 9.2 million poor without insurance is about 3 percent of the total population, even making the extreme assumption that every one of those 9.2 million are sick, and can't get the care they need. Even the 41 million uninsured is still only 14 percent of the population. While this, like you say, is still a hell of a lot of people, it does not truly reflect a national health care crisis that demands forcing the other 86 percent of the population into a system that cannot, in the long run, get the job done.

Canada and Britain are often used as examples of how well socialized medicine works. This is arguable, but there is a more important point:

Canada and Britain combined have less than 30 percent of America's population. Neither has a huge flood of immigrants pouring over its borders that also demand health care. The number of illegal immigrants alone in America is almost a third of the total population of Canada. Single-payer in America is not a simple proposition.

When you add on the immense bloating of ANY government program, it gets worse. When you factor in the tendency of government programs to dump money on problems without actually solving any, it gets worse still.

Government health care expenditures in 1960 were about 1 percent of the levels in 2001. And oddly, while I'm sure that people had health care problems then just like they do now, I don't remember people dying in droves in the streets in 1960.