Dear Editor:

Over the next few months our country will engage in the most significant domestic policy debate in any lifetime.

The Obama Administration is pushing a plan to radically alter our health care system. They are proposing the creation of a public plan available to all Americans, trying to leave the impression that they are essentially making Medicare available to all. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The system that would result would operate much differently than Medicare does now, and Medicare itself would be drastically change. The reason would be the necessity to contain the massive costs associated with such a plan. The president himself has pointed to Medicare "savings" as a principle source of funding for the new plan. While some money might be saved from cutting payments to providers and hospitals (not without its own consequences) the bulk of the money would have to come from new restrictions on the services patients could receive.

What would this entail? The president's own words answer the question. "End-of-life care" would be re-evaluated and "rules" would be set up. Sometimes you will have to "take a painkiller rather than have surgery." Make no mistake, patients in the prime of their lives would not face the bulk of this rationing. Instead it would be elderly patients — Medicare patients — whose treatment would be subjected to strict costbenefit analysis.

For elderly Americans, decisions on what treatment to provide are made every day by those who should make the decisions — patients, their families and their doctors. To place these decisions in the hands of a government number-cruncher with a rule book is chilling, perverse and un-American.

There are many other reasons to oppose this plan as well. But the ruthless implications for our seniors are the most frightening. This plan must be stopped. Michael Dale, M.D. Gaffney, S.C.