Every regional newspaper will get several letters a day until the current issue is resolved on nationalized health care. These letters are designed to give the impression that there is grass-roots support for these programs. You can buy into this premise if you wish, but you are being foolish to do so.

We also will be exposed to a wide variety of policy proposals, all with attractive sounding labels. The labels are as meaningless as the promises made by their proponents.

When the government makes health care decisions and pretends to pay the tab, then we are experiencing socialized medicine. It will be called almost anything else because Americans don't like the sound of the word "socialized," but that is what it is.

The entire debate about health insurance and the millions who do not have coverage is a smoke screen. The holy grail of socialism is socialized medicine, and any means is justified to achieve it, including misdirection and outright lying.

Why is this issue so important?

Socialized medicine changes the fundamental relationship of citizens to their government, and it changes not only the role of government, but even the very concept of government itself.

The fundamental American view has traditionally been that society is composed of free people who voluntarily associate with each other. They have rights as individuals independent of any external authority. One of those rights is the ability to control property, which includes your own body.

The people create governments to expedite certain group functions and to safeguard the property rights of individuals.

Like nuclear reactors, governments are useful but potentially dangerous instruments that need to be controlled and regulated, not by other governments, but by the people themselves.

Socialized medicine completely reverses this process. Citizens become wards of the state who must be controlled and regulated. The government decides who should get care and how much care should be given. Property must eventually come under governmental control in such a system, including the ultimate property of your own body.

Citizens become dependent children. The government becomes their parents.

The government, however, is all-powerful and its human core always is blurred by levels and levels of bureaucracy, regulations, and rules so the immediate human interactions become displaced by procedure and protocol. Add to this its ability to make life and death decisions and the government takes on the qualities of a capricious god.

This is why the advocates of socialized medicine, other than the economic illiterates who still believe in Santa Claus, aren't moved by arguments based on history, statistics and cost estimates.

Tell them that these programs don't work. Tell them horror stories of nations that have preceded us down this path. Show them the inhuman face of almost all government programs, tell them that we don't have the money and they just shrug. They don't care, because ultimately this has nothing to do with health care, or budgets or logic. It has to do with the socialist dream, and ultimately with power.

Some mistakenly believe that this issue is related to compassion and moral reasoning. They may say to opponents, "You don't care about people. Would you deny care to a person who can't pay for their health care?"

Besides pointing out the irony that the proposed solution to the cost of health care is more government intervention into a problem created largely by prior governmental meddling, the argument is mostly statistical nonsense. Consider this however; what have people in the past given for freedom?

Americans have been willing to pick up their weapons and go anywhere in the world in defense of freedom. Many Americans have been willing to die for this ideal. So now we are being told we lack compassion because we are unwilling to give up almost all of our remaining freedoms for a cheaper bottle of medicine from Wal-Mart.

But souls are cheap when governments play god.