It's a great way to open up, telling people that even what Barack or Hillary are offering aren't real solutions:

I'm not a medical ethicist. I'm a primary care doctor, and the way I think about health policy in this context is in terms of the issue of placebos. That is, for us as doctors it's unethical to prescribe a placebo when there's an effective therapy.

And I'm going to argue today that many of the current proposals are, in fact, placebo reforms and that they're unethical to endorse because, actually, effective reform exists.

The problem: We've got 47,000,000 uninsured Americans generating about 18,000 excess deaths among adults each year. So that's a problem. As we sit here over the next two days, 100 people will die in the United States for lack of health insurance. That's the core ethical problem we're trying to face here.

But there's also the issue about Americans being impoverished by paying for illness. That is, they do get the care, but they're impoverished.

Indeed, what they're offering, while better than what we have, won't solve anything. But at least they are willing to listen to what experts in the field like Dr. Woolhandler are saying.

Here she sums up the number one reason why we need to implement single-payer:

I think this is due, at least in part, to the very high overhead in the for-profit HMOs. I've sort of listed the market leaders here. Twenty-three, 21, 20 percent overhead. What that means is that for every dollar that is paid in as premium, either by the individual or in the case of Medicare by Medicare -- every dollar that's paid in, only about 77 cents actually comes out to pay a nurse, a doctor, a drug company.

Twenty-three cents stays right there with Aetna to pay for their overhead and profit. So a very simple-minded view of why HMO care does cause problems in terms of care of the chronically ill is that too much of the money is diverted away from care and toward overhead and profit, including the CEO pay and stockholdings, 2005, most recent date I could fine.

And I just love to pick on Jack Rowe , number three. He's a former colleague of mine at Harvard . He worked for Aetna for just under five years and earned about half a billion dollars. And to give you some sense of how much that is, Jack was earning $220,000. That is $220,000 per day for every day he worked at Aetna , including weekends and holidays. So that's money that's diverted away from patient care toward his exorbitant salary, also overhead and profit.[...]

And the US is already spending -- these are figures from a couple of years ago -- by far the most of any nation on earth on healthcare. The US is on the bottom. On the top I've listed total health expenditures in other developed nations. For the US at the bottom I've listed total per capita health expenditures divided into the publicly funded and the privately funded share.

And in publicly funded I've included not just Medicare, Medicaid, VA, but also the benefit cost of public employees like schoolteachers and FBI agents, also, so-called tax subsidy to private health insurance. And when defined in that way, I want you to just look and see where that yellow bar ends. Look where the yellow bar ends.

That is, we are already through our taxes paying the full price of national health insurance in this country, and then we take an additional $2,500 out of our pockets and pay privately, and we still have the circumstance of 47,000,000 uninsured people, millions more forced into medical bankruptcy.

Now, what do we get for the extra money? And in this set of slides I've got the US in yellow, the other countries in green. What do we get? We do not get longer life expectancy compared to other nations. We do not get lower infant mortality than other nations. In fact, our infant mortality is twice that of the world leaders.

We don't get more days in the hospital. We send patients out of the hospital quicker and sicker. We don't even get more innovation, more science. And I know one of the speakers brought that up earlier.

When you look at medical journal articles on a per-capita basis (and you get the same results if you look at total scientific output on a per-capita basis, the United States is not a world leader. So our extra spending is not generating more in the way of science when we look at it on a per-capita basis. That is a myth.

Even for certain high-technology treatments such as bone-marrow transplants, the United States is just in the middle of the pack. Where we do lead the world is in our insurance overhead and our administrative costs. And this is expressed on a per-capita basis for every man, woman, and child in the United States .

We lead the world in insurance overhead. We lead the world in difficulties getting care. This is people are asked, percent, finding it extremely, very, or somewhat difficult to get needed care. We lead the world. This is just the English-speaking world.

Single payer has the backing of both the American public and doctors in particular:

And in the latest poll I could find on this, an ABC News poll/ USA Today /Kaiser survey, people were asked, "Would you prefer the current health insurance system or a universal coverage program like Medicare that is government-run and financed by taxpayers?"

It's a pretty fair description, only I want to say that a single payer is not exactly universal Medicare. It's universal Medicare without co-payments and deductibles. So for those of you who work in health finance, we have a term for people, dual eligibles, who get Medicare and Medicaid, who get Medicare coverage, only everything is free.

So single payer is kind of like Medicare for all or Medicare dual eligibility for all. All effective treatments are, in fact, free, as they are in much of northwestern Europe and Canada .

Well, it turns out even with this question, a clear majority of Americans endorse the idea of a tax-funded system. In fact, when people are asked, "Which do you think is more important, providing healthcare for all or holding down taxes," a majority of Americans feel that it's more important to get healthcare for all.

Again, a bit of a loaded question because other countries have single-payer systems that are, in fact, cheaper than what we have. You might have to raise taxes, but then you would lower people's out-of-pocket payments and the amount of money deducted from their income for their employee benefits.

Finally, we did survey a random sample of Massachusetts physicians. We got the random sample from the AMA master file to ask, "Which of the following three structures would offer the best healthcare to the greatest number of people for a fixed amount of money?"

And, again, asking doctors, "What do you recommend? Not necessarily what you support, but what do you recommend as best for your patients?" By more than two to one, single payer beat out all the other alternatives, existing fee-for-service or managed care systems.

But the health care industry is going to continue to block it. I know that 23% of health care costs go to managed care overhead, but I wonder what percentage of that money goes to lobbying to prevent single-payer.

I just had access to the best health care system in the world up until just about a month ago. It was great - if I had anything wrong or was feeling sick I could just pop in to the doctor's office and see what was up. If it was a sign of something more severe, I would have known that at least I caught it early.

Nothing was wrong while I was on the French health care system, but then again I'm the exact sort of person who needs to be put on to a health care plan with people who need more health care. I'm young and pretty healthy, and others aren't. We all balanced each other out, so that no one has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for necessary treatment. And if something happened to me, I'd know that I could still go to the doctor and get it taken care of.

The US is so far behind on this, and it's up there as one of the biggest reasons I'm looking for work here in France instead of the US. I just don't know if Americans will ever just accept that this is a necessary part of living in a civilized world and whether American politicians could ever just let go of the money they get from lobbyists and implement something like this.

I know it's probably not going to happen any time soon. But at least I'll be healthy until we switch over... I hope.