An Anchor Rising commenter used to proclaim that collegiate right-wingers had it easy.  All they had to do was mouth the right ideas, and the giant udder of the conservative cash cow would descend upon them.

The notion is laughable.  Rhetoric consistent with a mainstream New England liberalism is the ticket to the front of the line around here.

Consider Felice Freyer’s column on the front page of the Sunday Rhode Island section, about an idea to pay for HealthSource RI, the state’s ObamaCare site.

Ted Almon “concedes he hasn’t done the math,” but he thinks if government claims a monopoly on medical billing, then all problems will be solved. Of course, government control would be better for this or that stakeholder, but the question is whether it’s better systemwide… for customers, taxpayers, the people who ultimately have to live with and pay for it.

You can’t ignore the cost to them.  Handling some financial tasks doesn’t make it free for HealthSource to scale activities to process all healthcare transactions.

And people already have jobs in medical billing.  Some work for providers; some are independent contractors.  All of the medical-billing contractors I’ve met have been middle-aged women doing the work from home for supplemental income.

Are state workers likely to be more cost-effective?  If the whole idea is to pay for HealthSource, they’d have to be tens of millions of dollars more cost-effective per year.

In short, the math is the idea.

But Almon is an advocate for a single-payer (i.e., totally government run) healthcare system.  He says he used to prefer free-market solutions, but he “figured out that none of them would work.”

I wonder if he did the math on that.  I wonder if anybody at the Providence Journal has… or even wants to find somebody who has.