Essay: Our Health-Care Disgrace

National health insurance is an idea whose time has come . . . and gone . . . and come again, sounding a little more querulous with each return, like any good intention that has been put off much too long. It was once, way back in the 1930s, a brisk, young, up-and-coming idea. By the late '60s, when Richard Nixon first declared a health-care "crisis," it was already beginning to sound a little middle-aged and weary. Today, with the health-care situation moving rapidly beyond crisis to near catastrophe, the age-old and obvious solution has the tone of a desperate whine:...

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