The argument seems to be:

* Businesses offer health care benefits.
* Health care has become too expensive.
* This expense is damaging businesses.
* Therefore, we need to socialize health care so businesses can be relieved of this expense.

The argument isn't very good, because there's a simpler solution. You just decouple businesses from health care. Largely, you can do this by eliminating the tax deduction that favors business' providing health insurance. Then businesses can decide for themselves if they want to keep providing this benefit.

I think unions are a better explanation for why Detroit is falling to pieces. Under our laws, a union becomes a monopoly in supplying labor to the company it is associated with. Unions then use their monopoly power to wreck these companies.

Both Obama and Hillary favor a vast expansion of the scope of unions through their "card-check" proposal.

Yay! Replace bad health insurance with no health insurance! It's genius!

The argument has to be taken as an extension of other prevailing arguments about the screwy state of the health care system.

That isn't the argument at all, and single-payer isn't socialized medicine. The argument is simple: single-payer has been proven to work in other countries. That other developed nations, all of which have some form of single-payer system, provide better health care at far lower cost is irrefutable.

It is sometimes better to remain silent and allow everyone to wonder if you are an idiot than to open your mouth and thereby remove all doubt.

Verbal is right. What does socialized medicine even mean other than a red flag, pardon pun. The national health systems seem to do a better job of providing immediate and lower stress care to everyone. Folks talk about long delays -- yes, for elective surgeries, for example. Kaiser Permanent has some of the positive features of a national/single payer system and although the ER isn't pleasant and there are co-pays, you can also get fast action from your primary provider, in my experience, while having to wait for non-urgent regular appointments or surgeries.