We are the only nation where paper is still the mainstay in the private insurance industry.

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.

We are the only nation where paper is still the mainstay in the private insurance industry.

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.

If you want to look at a purely socialized health care, you would have to go to the United States, where we have it. In particular, that's the system we reserve for our veterans. So if I hear politicians run down socialized medicine - and I have done that before the Congress - I say: Do you hate your veterans? Why do you reserve purely socialized medicine - there's only the U.S. and Cuba that have that - for the veterans? So getting the terms right would be very, very helpful in our national conversation on health reform.

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.

The bad things are that our financing of health care is really a moral morass. It is a moral morass in the sense that it signals to the doctors and hospitals that human beings have different values depending on their income status.