Link of the Day

Leif Wellington Haas on universal health care. I've been entering this discussion at a number of waypoints that haven't really allowed for a full explication of my views, but suffice to say I go with a couple axioms:

• The principle of universal coverage must either be built-in or planned for;

• There must be private involvement (I'm actually for a multipayer system a la France, not a textbook single payer, like Canada, but I tend to use the terminology "single-payer" to denote UHC with heavy government involvement. I should probably stop.);

• It must be simple to explain. That's why it must be presented without apology and constructed without preemptive compromise. Once you have a sellable platform, you can try to win over the public. Once you have the public, the stakeholders can demand modification. But you don't start out with a complicated, easily demonized plan in order to seek instant assent that'll never appear.

That's it, and I've found no better expansion of the view than Leif's post. Read it.