talking myself in circles about healthcare reform

Now having identified the perverse tactics of the right as lightning rods to distract from the main issue, health care for children, I suppose I ought not let them succeed, and spend some time contemplating the main issue. Honestly, I don't know much about it. I see it a small step of the battle for socialized medicine, and I don't know what to think about that either.

It seems to me that other nations are getting better results and spending a lot less money with a more nationalized system. It seems to me that insurance companies are getting fat off a steady flow administrative fees, and siphoning back some of that loot to the politicians to make sure they don't turn off the spigot. So it seems like turning off that flow and moving towards a more efficient system would be the right thing to do. But it also seems to me that more government power and bureaucracy are likely to be quite bad for everyone, given how the government has managed to turn basically everything they touch into a machine to make more money for rich people with utter disregard for the welfare of the population as a whole.

So I think essentially the question is: would a national single-payer healthcare system be a good thing, given that it will be run by this government? Some kind of idealism versus realism question. And of course it is just some incremental change in a system that basically needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Are any of these kinds of incremental changes useful? I don't even know how to evaluate these questions, and I imagine I sound pretty naive and pathetic. As a result I'm pretty ambivalent on the issue.

Ignorance. I guess that's why we'd rather focus on the lightning rods; it is much simpler to figure out what is right and wrong there.