The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes or altogether avoid them by means which the law permits cannot be doubted.

If you believe that health care is a public good to be guaranteed by the state then a single-payer system is the next best alternative. Unfortunately it is fiscally unsustainable without rationing.

Most illegals are without health insurance and when these workers need emergency healthcare the American taxpayer gets stuck with the bill.

But at the end of the day we need to represent the taxpayers who have made enormous sacrifices. Many have lost their jobs. Many of them have seen their companies - they don't have a pension - they have seen their companies cut the match for their 401(k). They have seen their health care benefits be shredded.

In the past week it has become clear that the vote on the final healthcare bill will be very close. I take this vote with the utmost seriousness. I am quite aware of the historic fight that has lasted the better part of the last century to bring America in line with other modern democracies in providing single payer health care.

I have worked to expand the health care debate beyond the current for-profit system to include a public option and an amendment to free the states to pursue single payer.

People are ready to say 'Yes we are ready for single-payer health insurance.' We are the only industrialized country in the world that does not have national health insurance. We are the richest in wealth and the poorest in health of all the industrial nations.

Obamacare is a seriously flawed law that makes health care coverage less affordable costs taxpayers more than advertised and fails to deliver on most of its other grand promises.

As a single-payer advocate I believe that at the end of the day if a state goes forward and passed an effective single-payer program it will demonstrate that you can provide quality health care to every man woman and child in a more cost-effective way.

If the goal of health-care reform is to provide comprehensive universal health care in a cost-effective way the only honest approach is a single-payer approach.