You’ll be pleased to know that Oregon will spend some $300,000 of your tax dollars in the next two years to study moving the state to a single-payer health care system.

You’d think we’d learn.

The bill funding the study was approved on the last day of the 2015 session.

We can only hope that the Oregon Health Authority, charged with conducting the study, approaches it with an open mind.

It is tasked with considering a variety of options for providing health care in Oregon, ranging from no change to a single-payer system that would wipe out private health insurance except as a supplement to what the state provides.

Given the realities of health care in Oregon, that former is surely the best option.

Oregon’s travails with the ACA make that clear.

The state not only got itself a website that didn’t work, the bills are still coming in for setting Cover Oregon up. And, lawsuits and counter-lawsuits have become part of the mix, driving costs up further.

Meanwhile, as the state expanded its Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid) program by a whopping 73 percent, that, too, is proving expensive. While officials originally estimated the state would spend some $217 million finance OHP in the 2017-19 biennium, that number has changed. Now, they say, the pricetag is likely to be $369 million, about 10 percent of the general fund budget during those years.

Where, one wonders, would the money for a universal system worthy of the name come from? Premiums could provide some revenue, to be sure, if that’s how it would work.

But Oregon already cannot pay to educate its children adequately. Its support for its colleges has dwindled to next to nothing. It is going to struggle just to pay its current OHP bills, much less cover the inevitable expansion of “free” services in a single-payer system.

All that makes the study’s “do nothing” option the only one that makes sense.