Apparently lots of people are as gullible as Charlie Brown. How many of you remember the New York Times‘ poll last month?

The exact question was, “Would you favor or oppose the government’s offering everyone a government-administered health-insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans?” Seventy-two percent favored such a plan. Twenty percent were ignorant enough to oppose it.

Who do you trust? John Belushi got it right. Most academics get it wrong.

Everyone in academia knows just what a symposium is. At least they think they know. Have you read Plato’s Dialogues? One was named Symposium. Yes, the Greeks had a word for it: a drunken party. I could have heard much more intelligent talk at an Animal House toga party than I heard at a medical symposium held at Vanderbilt University.

The astronauts had their Tranquility Base on the Moon’s Mare Tranquillitatis. They wouldn’t share so I had to find one for myself. It is Buzzard’s Roost in Tennessee’s Fall Creek Falls State Park. And no, it wasn’t named for me.

Once again it’s time to veg out and gain some more weight. How else will I justify a new wardrobe?

I’m off in the morning for the annual nine days at the park. At more than 25,000 acres it is easily the state’s largest. It sits up on the Cumberland Plateau. That’s usually good for 5-8 degrees of relief from the Summer’s heat. I think that, being at a higher elevation, it is slightly further from Hades.

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I‘ve written extensively about healthcare reform. Those postings are full of numbers, arguments, observations and such. If your Alzheimer’s is temporarily predominant and you need some refreshing of those details, read or reread some of those articles.

This post, based largely on those articles, is just to put all of the various options together in context in very simple terms. My intent is just to provide a bit of perspective and tie it all up with a neat little bow. It is the result of my desire to clean up before going to another topic.

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Here is my small tribute to all of the fellow members of my gender for Father’s Day.

Why it’s great to be a guy.

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The President has a headache. His healthcare reform is in trouble. He can’t even get a bipartisan agreement that Dr. Seuss ate green eggs and ham.

Two noted health reporters, the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic, this week had major articles marking the difficulties the President’s reform was running into in Congress. While Speaker Pelosi continues to insist that the House will produce some vague public option that is to Obama’s liking, the Senate is still taking their marching orders from the healthcare industry.

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The headlines say that 73% support a public option as a part of healthcare reform. That sounds good for advocates of reform. There is a problem though. Almost no one cheering this actually understands what a public option would be.

There is also the question of a single-payer system. As one of the readers of this blog asked, just what is the difference between a public option and a single-payer system? This is an area of widespread confusion. This confusion is intentional. Let’s clear this up right now.

To fully explain this and divulge the motivations behind the confusion we need to begin with a look at some fundamental assumptions. These assumptions are totally false but almost universally held here in the US by those on both sides of the question of healthcare reform.

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Where does the Congress stand on healthcare reform? Who knows?

Nancy Pelosi is the leader of the House of Representatives. She has a commanding edge of Democrats over Regressives. One would think that would give her more leeway than Senator Reid. She should be able to at least make a stab at formulating a rational reform plan. See, you thought you understood politics.

Salvador Dali may have understood what his art represented. Or, maybe not. Either way it isn’t always clear to every observer. I find we are in the same situation with regard to what Congress means. It is also fairly certain that Senor Dali had a firmer grasp of what he intended than does Congress.

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A level playing field for healthcare reform is a myth. A public option is a scam. Or, maybe it’s a sham. It’s probably both.

I was riding in the car, listening to an interview of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius on the local public radio station. Since I was not taking notes, my recitation of that interview isn’t composed of direct quotes – it is based solely on what remains of my memory.

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They are arguing the inarguable. The Regressives in Washington are arguing an issue that should have been settled during the Truman Administration.

Had we instituted a national healthcare system based on a single-payer, we would now be without a national debt. This would be true even if all the wasteful spending on the military and in other areas remained unchanged. This would be true even if the leeches on Wall Street and the prostitutes in Congress had behaved exactly as they have. How does that grab you?

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