How many small businesses can absorb the $12,000 per family annual cost of employer-provided health insurance? Our car manufacturers are unable to compete with foreign manufacturers because the cost of providing health benefits to employees, dependents and retirees now adds $1,500 in cost to each new car. Lifesavers closed up its plant in Holland, Mich., and moved it to Canada where it could reduce labor costs by $4 an hour. General Electric, Boeing, Lucent Technologies, IBM, Verizon, SBC Communications and Ford Motor are all struggling with skyrocketing health benefit costs.

The clerical burden of submitting claims to a multitude of different private and government health plans has driven up costs for physicians and hospitals as well. At the Governor's Summit, physician Kim Bateman said since he moved his practice to Ephraim and sees only uninsured patients, he can function with one employee and has dropped his patient charges by two-thirds.

A single-payer health plan is the only sane solution to reducing the administrative overhead of multiple publicly and privately funded health plans. Why not use this money to cover all Americans? Would it displace thousands of people working in the health insurance industry? You bet! But wouldn't it be far better to retrain these people to deliver health care rather than deny health claims?

Encourage your congressmen and senators to reintroduce the States' Right to Innovate in Health Care Act (formerly HR1033), which would allow an individual state to explore health-care reform without jeopardizing existing federal dollar contributions.

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Christine B. Helfrich is a member of the Health Care Reform Caucus of the state Democratic Party.