God, you'll never get it will you. Our government is us Tom, not some bunch of politburo elite that sit in their ivory towers and look down their noses at the huddled masses. The huge numbers of people that work within our government dealing with the social programs you speak of are our neighbors and friends.

I just quit my job with United Health Care because I saw something far more scary than the Leninist system you envision. I saw a corporate behemoth engaged in the raping of the country's resources in the name of huge profits at a time when the majority of our neighbors are dying and being made financially destitute from their health care burden. I saw the ethos of the fat and lazy industries that you and your cronies believe are the backbone of our nation and it sickened me.

The 30+ percent slice these corporations are sucking out of our health care dollar have to go away if we and our children have any chance to live in an ethical and successful society and I could no longer be a part of that system. Many of my coworkers understood completely why I was leaving.

Every assumption you make about the costs associated with running a completely socialized medical system in our country conveniently ignores the huge savings wiping out the middle man creates as well as the tremendous boost all of our industries get from not having to shoulder the burden of providing benefits to their employees. Imagine the tax increases you'll see as their profits begin to rise and scores of new small business open up that never could before. You also imply that Medicare and Medicaid costs can simply be multiplied by the number of new participants to get the final cost but even that leaves out a huge savings you get from removing the entire antiquated system we use to reimburse our physicians and the overly complicated medical coding system. I worked in that daily and it is hopelessly broken. Ever doctor, physician, and hospital in our country must employ a huge staff of expensive workers with skills in that stupid field. Pay those physicians an annual salary and all that goes away. Then add in the cost savings in preventing emergency care (that we already pay for anyway) by providing preventative care for all.

Nobody is stupid enough to believe it can happen overnight. It must be phased in slowly with one demographic after another slowly being added. Nobody either actually believes the rich must entirely pay for this system. I have never heard anyone make that claim. All the plans I've seen talk about the burden being shared among the American people. Any inference to the wealthy picking up more of the burden has more to do more with the impression that they have slowly been shedding their fair part of the responsibility. You can pull out all the charts and figures you want Tom but I'm now wealthy enough to understand the huge advantages wealth gives one in hiding or protecting their income from taxes. When you're a huge corporation that can move assets overseas you take back more from America than you give in.

You know as well as I do that your vision of liberalism and social programs in our country is overblown and mostly hype. Why you continue to push these buttons is beyond me.

Art