That phrase "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you," has been the butt of jokes for many years. The implication is that the government can't do anything right and any attempt to help people turns into a mess. That is what Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats are saying about health care. They claim that allowing the government to run one of the options for health care insurance will lead to "death panels," "euthanasia of the elderly," and as Sarah Palin said, is downright evil. 

It's interesting to note that the same people who asked us to trust the government with secret spying and enhanced interrogation methods now tell us that it cannot reform health care. "Trust the government," they said. It will only spy on terrorists and only the worst of the worst will be tortured. Now we find that many of the detainees at Guantanamo were not terrorists at all and should never have been there. 

So if we can't trust our government to keep us safe, and we can't trust our government to set a level playing field and bring down costs in health care, what can we trust it to do? In the 1990's we had real welfare reform while some were claiming that welfare recipients would starve to death when their benefits ran out. That didn't happen and most everyone said that the reform was a success. That shows that we could have real health care reform if the extremist rhetoric on both sides is toned down. Lack of reform will not cause the US to fail, and reform will not cause people to die. But the reform must be something that most everyone can buy into. Otherwise we will again go decades before reform is again attempted and we will limp along with seriously broken system.