Insurance companies are required by law to maintain large reserves. Do you want them to put it under a mattress? Or maybe they could loan it to themselves and "double" their money like the government does with the Social Security trust fund?

And of course, once the government is running everything, greed, corruption, graft, lobbying and fraud will vanish into thin air, right? And of course we, the people, will have control of all this with our magical votes. After all, look at military spending and contracts over the past generation. Look at Medicare, which clocks something like $60 billion in fraud a year for a system that covers about 13 percent of the population.

Let me try to get this across: I am not saying that the current system is without flaws. I am saying that the flaws will only get a lot worse, and a whole bunch of brand new ones will turn up, if you turn it over to the government and its motivations. This has been documented in other countries where they have tried to replace market forces with political ones in health care. Their costs are still increasing, the services are getting worse, and even places like Canada are looking at bringing some private services back. In addition, these nations have drawn on our robust and innovative health system and its advances and wealth much as they've tapped their national security off our military spending for years.

If ours goes down, so will theirs.

This issue is being driven by a religious faith in the State. Twenty percent of this country is going to drag the rest of us down with them unless it's stopped.