Too often the arguments decay into comparing the grubby details of private systems and public ones, with examples and anecdotes galore.

Private health providers and insurers will do a good job a lot of the time. Also, there will be screwups, lousy practices, and even outright corruption. Guess what--same thing is true of public providers and insurers. Human beings run both.

The difference is that if everything is run by a government entity, screwups, lousy practices and corruption become universal, affecting everyone, not something that can be isolated and dealt with.

Enron made headlines, but huge as the company was, nobody except Enron investors lost sleep when Enron was busted. If Enron had been a nationalized nationwide energy company that held all of the market, then what?

Wasn't the main problem with the mortgage industry companies and government/private entities that were "too big to fail?" So instead of being busted, they were coddled and rescued. Some people have said that "too big to fail" should mean "too big to exist." I've thought about that, and there's something to it. Incidentally, hardly anybody has noticed that the mortgage industry is still doing some of the same things it was before, except that now the election is over. If there's a huge rush to create new regulations in the new Democratic Washington, I must have missed it.

In countries where the government runs everything, corruption, incompetence and failure are institutions, not exceptions. Concentration of power in too few hands is always a recipe for disaster.

If someone proposed that, for cost and efficiency, that the U.S. should have only one single private health care provider, say Blue Cross Mega or something, I would be as fervently opposed to that as I am to a government monopoly, and for the same reasons.

I don't want nationalized health care because I don't want all my health eggs in that one basket, especially a basket run by politicians. It's that simple. The touching faith many seem to have in government running things cheaply and effectively requires somehow suppressing the knowledge of all the other things the government runs, including existing government health systems.

We have made a lot of progress in opening up choices in other areas of our lives. When I moved here years ago, I had no choice at all on phone companies or cable companies. The "phone store" had maybe a dozen phones to choose from. Cities here had one legal cable company. Note that these companies were supposedly "private," but protected by government from competition. Now, after a stretch of deregulation, I've got enough choices to give me a headache, but there are choices, and the companies are hungry for my business instead of unresponsive bastards. I'd like to see this happen in health care. Choices and competition, not a monolith. There are ways to begin moving in this direction in health care, too.

Alternatively, if government health care is such a great idea, and everybody wants it, let the states do it first. Different ways and different levels, just like the health care systems around the world have no two systems alike. See what works. If anything.

The Democrats tried to squirt this stuff through before anybody had a chance to look at it. You'd think that alone would raise someone's antenna a bit.