I'd like to give you an analogy. Remember back when we had Ma Bell? Southwestern Bell in Kansas, Mountain Bell in Colorado, and Bell Telephone all across the U.S. The telephone belonged to the phone company and you couldn't work on it. You had to wait a few days for the phone man to come to the house. Most phones were black plastic but there were a few pastel greens and blues available. Some ritzy families had an extension on the wall in the kitchen or an extension in the bedroom. You had to pay whatever rates the phone company was able to get by going through government beaurocracies.

People used to think that you couldn't have two phone companies because you'd have to have two telephones in every house and two sets of lines and two sets of operators and it would be lots of duplication.

Sometime in the 60's or 70's, someone figured out how to have multiple phone companies without duplicate lines, and we broke up the monopoly. Not long after that, you gained the right to work on the wiring in the house. Then companies started making custom phones in different colors and styles. My daughter had a telephone that would blink as it rang. Telephones were made in the shape of Mickey Mouse and other characters. By the 90's, everybody was getting a bag phone, that they could use in the car. Finally in the new century, we had cell phones, in all sizes, shapes and colors. And along with that comes prolific advertising. One company will advertise several minutes for a lower price, then another company will compete with more minutes for less money, then another company will advertise more benefits for less money, and it goes on and on. It's the competition that brings about the lower rates and more features.

If there's no competition, then there's no need to offer lower rates or more features.

A single payer health care system is like going from cell phones back to the black plastic phone wired to the wall. If you go to the doctor's office, you have to wait in line in the office for your turn. If you disagree with the diagnosis and want to get a second opinion, where do you go? There is no competition so there's no other choice. That's what socialized medicine is--giving up your choice. If you want a different treatment, what can you do?

Right now, England and Canada have socialized medicine. There are people being turned away for treatments. For example, if Aunt Burneeta wanted another hip transplant, they would tell her that at 93 years old, there's no way she could pay the debt back to society, so they would give her a wheelchair. In England and Canada, when a person has macular degeneration, they wait until the patient goes blind in one eye before they will treat the other eye. Many many Brits and Canadians are being turned away from medical treatments. Those who are rich can come to the U.S. and pay a private doctor for treatment, but what happens when the U.S. no longer has private doctors? There's no place left to go.

As far as doctors are concerned, if they only get paid wages from government, why bother to go through all those years of school to become a doctor? If they know they can build a private practice, where they can make money plus help people get back to health, then it's worth all those years of school. So under a government led system, the quality of doctors will decline considerably.

All along the southwest border, thousands of illegal aliens are crossing into the U.S. every week. The first thing they do is go to a hospital for health care that they can't get in their own countries. Those hospitals have orders from the government to give health care to those illegal aliens even if they have to do it for free. That means that hundreds of insurance claims have had to be filed, and hundreds of lawsuits, and many hospitals are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy because they have to give health care for free. This is one of the main reasons that health care is so expensive.

Going back to the analogy with Bell Telephone, if the single payer system is dumped for multiple companies, then there will be competition, which means companies will compete for your business. Each company will have to offer good service for a low price, or go out of business. Each doctor will have incentive to offer good service for a lower price. But in the process, these companies will make a good profit, just like the phone companies. Everybody will benefit.

The important point is the competition. Under a single payer system, without competition, there's no need to work hard or accomplish things, and everybody gets fat and lazy. Maybe you remember stories from the Communism in Russia, where a factory would set empty, not operating, rusting away. Everybody got paid but they didn't have to work, so nobody worked. There was no incentive and nothing got done. There was, however, a thriving black market because people needed products and services that they couldn't get through the single payer system.

A very important question to ask is do you trust the government? Do you want to hand over all your health information to the government? Do you believe that the government always makes the right decision? What if you disagree with the government's decision, where can you go and what can you do against the government? It's ironic that the very same people who deeply criticized the government for it's handling of Hurricane Katrina are the same people who want you to turn over all your personal information to the government for health care.