The American people are not ready for the idea that everyone has at least a moral right to good, timely health care. They do agree they have a moral right, in critical cases, to have anything done to save their life, but they don't believe that anyone has a right not to fall that sick to begin with. So if you ask me, "Are we ever succumbing to some notions of solidarity as a nation?," I would say, "Not at all." I would describe us as a group of people who share a geography. That's a better description of Americans than that we're a real nation with a sense of solidarity.

The bad things the U.S. health care system are that our financing of health care is really a moral morass in the sense that it signals to the doctors that human beings have different values depending on their income status. For example, in New Jersey, the Medicaid program pays a pediatrician $30 to see a poor child on Medicaid. But the same legislators, through their commercial insurance, pay the same pediatrician $100 to $120 to see their child. How do physicians react to it? If you phone around practices in Princeton, Plainsboro, Hamilton - none of them would see Medicaid kids.

There are libertarian values which say private property is the overarching value, the sanctity thereof, and there are egalitarians who say health care should be shared and so on. That's fair enough.

The issue of universal coverage is not a matter of economics. Little more than 1 percent of GDP assigned to health could cover all. It is a matter of soul.

Everybody should have health care, on the one hand. But on the other hand, if you ask Americans, "Are you willing to pay for it?," they say no. So I've never been able to understand this contradiction.

The [Hobby Lobby Supreme Court] ruling raises the question of why, uniquely in the industrialized world, Americans have for so long favored an arrangement in health insurance that endows their employers with the quasi-parental power to choose the options that employees may be granted in the market for health insurance.

The ACA is an ugly patch on an ugly system - and I don't think it's worth mentioning in the context of price or quality transparency.