Another healthcare capsule summary

Reform proponents exaggerate the complexity of the issue to elevate their own status as people who understand it; opponents exaggerate it to make the whole endeavor out to be a bureaucratic monstrosity.

This gets a bit tiresome for reporters such as me who are writing article after article about the debate, only to have another pundit, politician or colleague dismiss the whole subject as an incomprehensible mess. Well, health care is a mess. Our current system is a mishmash that consumes 16 percent of the economy. Fixing it could be very simple: a single-payer system. To the dismay of many liberals, President Obama and congressional Democrats think it's more realistic to build on what's already there, which is why legislation overhauling it comes in the form of 1,000-page tomes.

Yet the basic outlines are emerging. What follows is an attempt to boil the health-care debate down to 1,000 words -- a summary you can take to the beach or on the plane or, if you already know it all, send to your Aunt Millie. Love the proposals or hate them, people can try to make sense of them. There is no excuse!