Correspondent of the Day: Single-Payer Option Is the Sticky Point

Single-Payer Option Is the Sticky Point
Editor, Times-Dispatch Everyone wants health care reform. Basically there are only two real issues in the debate that are contentious.

First, how are we going to pay for it and keep it deficit-neutral? President Barack Obama has not written a plan and without details one can't discuss it -- so we'll have to use the House bill.

The House bill, HR 3200, is going to cost almost a trillion dollars. That will come from either increased taxes or Medicare cuts. The talk of using savings by eliminating fraud and waste in Medicare is laughable. If the government can identify and eliminate $600 billion of fraud and waste out of Medicare, why wait? Do it now. So, the choices are: increased taxes or Medicare cuts?

The second issue is the government-run health plan. Conservatives and many moderates don't want it because they are convinced that it will lead to a single-payer, government-controlled health care system. Progressives and liberals demand a government plan be included because they believe it will lead to the single-payer system that they want. So we all pretty much agree about the outcome. It is just a matter of whether you want single-payer, government-controlled health care or not.

How much is a trillion dollars? If you got a job that paid you a dollar a second it would take you 11.6 days to earn a million dollars. It would take you, working 24 hours a day 7 days a week, 31.7 years to earn a billion dollars. It would take you more than 31,000 years, working night and day, to earn a trillion dollars.

Charlie Crowder.
Glen Allen.