In my head I keep hearing the voice of a woman from last week’s town hall meeting on health care held by Rep. Rick Boucher. In response to a public option for health insurance, this woman asked the question, “How can I trust the government?”

It’s a legitimate question. Our government, over the course of roughly 233 years, has given its citizens lots of reasons to distrust it. Obviously many of the folks—some of them quite angry—gathered in Edwards Hall at New River Community College in Dublin think the government is not to be trusted in the health care business.

They scoffed at Boucher for saying he didn’t think the public option being debated was, in fact, socialized medicine. I heard loud boos from the crowd when Boucher mentioned a move toward electronic medical files (presumably because people don’t trust the government?). So when I hear a woman’s voice ask how she can trust the government, and much of the crowd applauds wildly, I have to pause for a moment to wrap my head around this issue.

And I come up with the question, would socialized medicine really be that bad?

I do have trouble trusting the government. But I also have trouble—probably more so—trusting  insurance companies. I’ve had good and bad experiences with insurance companies. When my wife (at the time) was pregnant and had numerous complications all along the way, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Alabama was fantastic and I am still extremely thankful for the service we received. Without it, I might not have a healthy and intelligent 9-year-old daughter.

But just a few months after that, I changed jobs and moved to Washington State, where my experiences with Aetna were horrendous. I swear their philosophy was to frustrate the customer so much and cause such a hassle that the customer eventually would just give up on their rightful claim. It worked with me more than once.

And as someone who is now self-employed, my current situation with health insurance is quite troubling as very few standard things are covered without me first paying a huge deductible. Basically, I can’t afford to get sick.

You can watch Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko or even shorter anecdotal video clips such those that you can see here or here or here or here or even here. No reasonable person can dispute that our current system of health care had innumerable flaws.

I saw people at Tuesday’s town hall meeting become infuriated at the thought of trusting our government to health care. But when the call comes up to fight tyranny and spread democracy in Iraq, I doubt most of those people grabbed up their guns (which I’m sure they own) and bought their own plane ticket to Baghdad to take up the fight. They instead depended on the U.S. Armed Forces, operated by the federal government. When they want to send a birthday card to Aunt Sue in Iowa, they don’t drive the card there themselves, they send it via the U.S. Postal Service, operated by the federal government.

I could go on and on with examples as there are hundreds of federal agencies out there designed to, in some way, help us lead better lives. Admittedly, they aren’t all as efficient as they should be and some have problems with corruption, but isn’t that true with insurance companies—or just about any corporation?

I think health care reform is needed. And quite frankly, I’m not sure what the best option is. I am disheartened, however, that a single-payer plan—or what those at last week’s town hall meeting would demonizingly call socialized medicine—is not really even getting mentioned in the debate. I’d at least like to see some smart and reasonable people offer the pros and cons of such a system.

But for now it seems that the “new liberals” at Fox News and other like-minded anti-reform folks are controlling the debate with massive amounts of propaganda and talk of fictional items such as death panels.

I’m not sure what the answers are to health care reform, but I’d like to hear clear, concise, and honest debate on the issue, and that seems difficult to find these days.

So what are your thoughts on health care reform? We want to know your opinion! Write your comments below!

Tim W. Jackson is Editor of the New River Voice.