As to Mrs. Rodham-Clinton’s proposal to enforce a mandatory insurance, there are still an awful lot of turns and corners that have to be worked out. Personally, I’m in favor of providing the same guarantee of efficacy and efficiency to the entity overseeing the implementation of what really ought to be a government’s priority policy providing of universal public health care - by the same entity that’s already proven, for many decades, to offer such guarantees at a fraction of the by comparison usury (not to mention a stronger qualification) overhead of “operating costs” of private enterprises, namely in programs such as Medicaid and Medicare. There’s absolutely nothing to justify the mythical mantra of “government inefficiency” in handling national (as in: universal) social health care programs, other than sheer prejudice.

If the same type of people in charge of corporations that currently “manage” health insurance policies were to get their hands on such a national program, the result would be a multiplication by several orders of magnitude of the inefficacy and inefficiency that is driven by sheer top-level executives’ greed. Their bottom line is in juxtaposition with the social purpose entrusted to them; in a national program, their role should be marginal at best.

As to the “insolvency” of the “social security system”, I believe that the mad caps placed on top-level incomes bears the brunt of the blame. And that’s not a partisan issue, it’s simply the result of a collective wrong-headed mindset. A mindset that has led to such nigh inexplicable situations as the current one regarding access to health care, where a historic misunderstood concept of government and government accountability has “managed” to leave dozens of millions of fellow citizens out in the cold, and to die. That is a “problem” that can’t and won’t be solved by placing more or less clever tags and labels on programs (e.g., by referring to “insurance” while it’s inevitably a rolling pay-as-you-go approach, where the nation’s welfare dictates the citizens’ wellbeing).

Honesty and clarity is an absolute prerequisite in that debate, not partisan or otherwise ideologically stumped reflexive attitudes.

To paraphrase a time-tested axiom: the greatness of a nation is greatly judged by the treatment of its most vulnerable citizens. The future of a great nation lies, therefore, even more so in the hands of its current citizens’ ability to devise a civilized, reasonable and sensible approach to discussing the path to that future.

The “cost of a government run health care system”, even while objectively much, much lower than a commercial alternative, should be considered in light of its overall benefits. Cost of opportunity and all that jazz.

The cost of a government run healthcare system combined with, an insolvent social security system that democrats will not even acknowledge being a problem, a medicare system that will go broke before social security does and other social programs will dessimate our government and wreck the future of our children.

Actually, Lawrence Lindsay had the temerity of suggesting a cost between $100 and $200 billion; four times the amount estimated by the OMB’s Director and (then SecDef) Donald Rumsfeld, but it got him fired eventually just the same.

According to the National Priorities Project, the tally for “real” expenditure on the war in Iraq stands, at the moment of this typing, at just over $455 billion. According to estimates by Scott Wallsten and Katrina Kosec, published two years ago (!) the total, global cost of the war in Iraq through the year 2015 would be about 1 trillion dollars (of which $600bn was attributed by them to the US’ budgets). But that’s a conservative estimate. Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes put the total expenditure much higher: about 2 trillion in a study published in the fall of last year (2006).

And to think that coverage to provide universal health care to all those presently uninsured in the US would cost about 100 billion dollars… Less than half this year’s spending on the war in Iraq.

Our president lives in a fantasy world. On those rare occasions when he has the facts, he lies about them.

His next dream is to invade Iran and he comes ever closer to realizing that. His dreams are our nightmares.