Would the two sides of the single-payer healthcare debate please take the electron microscope off of Europe's record of deciding what treatments to fund, and have a quick peek at our own instead? I realize that neither side is going to like what they'll see. Pro hates to think that the government cannot be trusted even with the little power over our health we've already given it, and Con comprises most of those who've abused that power. So I guess it's up to this fence sitter to say it:

Have we learned nothing from the de-facto ban on stem-cell research? Abstinence-only sex ed? Bush's old Mexico City plan, announced near the start of his term, under which our foreign aid money couldn't fund a relief agency that so much as uses the word "abortion" around the broke and pregnant? Just as in Dr. Peeno's testimony shown in Sicko, the force of these mandates is easy to disguise with weasel arguments about denial of payment vs. denial of treatment. And yes, there is room for argument here about what the government should be funding in the first place and how much human misery is really its fault when the money is taken away.

All of which would be beside the point if we ever had a single-payer health care system. Having agreed that the government should pay for our treatment at all, and having made the system so ubiquitous that only the ultrarich have private practitioners to run to, we'd be one election away from getting the kind of leaders who would poop their petticoats for the chance to make impossible the Pill, AIDS treatment, hospice care (instead of full-on life support), and half the biotechnologies newer than insulin. The government health system itself would remain mostly intact because threatening it would doom a campaign quicker than a Social Security scare. So in this case we have no way to sugarcoat the situation: the powerful would be deliberately sacrificing the lives and wellbeing of those who catch the wrong illness just as in our current system. Is it really less evil if it's done for the Almighty Lord instead of the almighty dollar?

I don't claim that this is a reason to give up on single-payer health care altogether. But it does disturb me that the question of how to forestall such abuses is not even part of the controversy.