At least we’re finally getting to the core of the argument about health care.

In a nutshell, the question is whether insurance companies should be allowed to continue their bloodsucking ways, insulated from market forces; or whether their high-paid execs should be given that free market they claim to want, competing against a so-called public option similar to Medicare.

Medicare is clearly cheaper and provides better outcomes, which is why the health-care industry, so called, is against it.

…critics argue that with low administrative costs and no need to produce profits, a public plan will start with an unfair pricing advantage. They say that if a public plan is allowed to pay doctors and hospitals at levels comparable to Medicare’s, which are substantially below commercial insurance rates, it could set premiums so low it would quickly consume the market.

Although the numbers are disputed by public plan advocates, the Lewin Group, a health care consulting firm, recently projected that a plan paying Medicare rates would prompt 119 million of the 172 million people who are privately insured to switch policies (while also providing coverage to 28 million of the 46 million uninsured).

Makes sense, if you consider it. A public, or single-payer, plan would have less overhead and therefore be cheaper. Any idiot can see that, even an insurance-company executive. Then there’s the negotiating leverage, currently firmly in the grasp of execs from the drug and health-care companies, that would naturally end up in the hands of consumers. Namely, you and me.

It’s so unfair, so contrary to the basic philosophy of capitalism, to start with a pricing advantage arising from superior efficiency and reduced need for profit! It’s cheating, really; you can see why true capitalists want to be insulated from such practices.

Capitalism, to paraphrase Prudhon, is theft. The sooner we realize that money is holding up the advance of civilization, the sooner we grow up and reach for the stars. Universal health care should be a basic human right: if you exist, you get health care. And food, clothing, housing, education, and transportation. We could do all that now if we chose, but we don’t because it wouldn’t serve to concentrate wealth.

Sunset all corporations; force those whose aspirations require a large gap between themselves and others to declare that fact publicly. After all, markets are most efficient when most fully informed.