Republican Congressman, Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, said last week that public health plan “is gonna kill people.”

“A lot of people are going to die,” said Broun, who is a doctor.

The British and Canadian systems of universal health care he said, “don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society, evidently.”

I’m involved in some aspects of healthcare. I can tell you right away that it is complicated.

What is not complicated is the basic truth. We all want a healthy citizenry. A healthy citizenry is the foundation of a healthy nation. A healthy nation is a precursor to a wealthy nation. A wealthy nation is to the benefit of all of her inhabitants.

Other basic truths are as follows: No self-respecting civilized nation can afford to have 13% of its citizens without health insurance. It is a mockery of the ‘civilized’ tag. How the United States managed to get away with such injustice, for such a long time, is a mystery. Offering 40 million Americans just an opportunity to visit the emergency room when they are critically ill is like offering a criminal justice defendant an attorney only when they are placed on death row. You cannot run a criminal justice system that way; neither can you run a healthcare system in that manner.

For good reasons, when a government, any government, declares an issue as urgent and unsustainable, many Americans worry. Having said that, the crisis in the healthcare system in America is urgent and unsustainable. With cost going high and premium soaring and more and more companies unable to provide health insurance to their workers, doing nothing is not an option. Doing something, no matter what, is going to be expensive.

I hope we are all in agreement up to this point.

…Now the complicated aspects.

Providing a public option for those who cannot buy into the existing private insurance plans has been opposed vehemently. Those in opposition throw every arrow at their disposal at such plan.

Those who say it is the first step towards a socialized medicine cannot explain why that is so when they are supposed to keep their current private plan.

Those who say that government will ration specialized care seem to be worried about care people who have no insurance now will receive when they buy into a public option.

Some have argued that such a plan will kill off the private insurance companies because people will walk away from their private insurance and buy into a public plan. People making this charge have not been able to explain why the U.S. Postal Services has failed to kill off Fedex and UPS.

Talking about the U.S. Postal Services, some have argued that the Post Office and the Amtrak, all government outfits, have been poorly managed. They imply that the public healthcare option is doomed to such faith.

Should we then abandon such proposal because it may be poorly managed? Should we close down the U.S. post offices across America because it is poorly managed? Should we sell off Amtrak because it is poorly managed?

Is Fedex, with its efficiency, servicing all of America, and Americans, that the post office is not needed? Are the private bus services and airlines covering all of America, and Americans, that Amtrak is not needed? Wouldn’t the forces of free market shut down the U.S Postal Services and Amtrak if they are so ineffective and unnecessary? How much subsidy does the government put into public outfits like the U.S. Postal Services when compared to government subsidies to private businesses in America?

If public option will kill private health insurance, why hasn’t the public school systems kill off private schools?

Here is what I think: those who oppose the public option do so because their tax money may be used to provide insurance for their fellow citizens. They would rather have these citizens remain without health insurance. They would rather see them die untimely deaths.

That is what it is all about. Everything else is theatric.

The trouble with killing the concept of the greater good is in that warning found in the good book. It said that ‘what we are, they were; and what they are, we shall become.’