Given the recent brouhaha over Senator Barack Obama's unattributed use of a speech by Governor Patrick, we were surprised to hear the Green-Rainbow party's criticism of the Massachusetts Health Insurance Plan being lifted by the Governor himself!

In June, 2006 we wrote that the Massachusetts mandate to buy private health insurance was "like declaring an end to homelessness by requiring everyone to rent an apartment without heat and hot water."

Two years later, Governor Patrick has come to the same conclusion, declaring that without cost controls, requiring everyone to buy health insurance makes no more sense than trying to "cure homelessness by ordering everybody to buy a house."

We admit it. The Governor is a better wordsmith.

But his change of words also reveals another truth: in two short years, health insurance that used to cost about the same as an unfurnished apartment now costs as much as a predatory mortgage!

We now ask the Governor to steal the rest of our proposal. Adopt the only proven solution to our health-insurance problems: the privately provided, publicly financed health-care system known as single payer. This system is already in place in countries from Germany to Japan. We deserve no less.

One party now controls the Massachusetts House, Senate, and the Governorship. We are living in a Democratic nirvana. So why do we still not have single-payer health care? And by the way, why haven't we cured homelessness?

Nat Fortune of Whateley is Green-Rainbow Party cochair and Dr. Jill Stein of Lexington was 2006 Green-Rainbow candidate for Secretary of the Commonwealth