A right, not a privilege, cont.

Michael Kinsley suggests, wisely, a more moderate approach to health care reform than what these guys suggest. (I linked to the latter article in the comments to this post earlier in the week.)

If you're not as hopeful as Krugman and Wells about being able to avoid rationing, you face the question: Should people be allowed to opt out of rationing if they can afford it? That is, if the system (private or single-payer) won't pay for the $100,000 pill, should you be able to pay for it yourself? Fear that this would not be allowed helped to kill the Clinton health-care reform 13 years ago. But explicitly granting some people life and health while denying these things to others is hard, even though this disparity has existed throughout history and is probably unavoidable. In fact, a serious defect of single-payer is that it makes all sorts of unbearable trade-offs explicit government policy, rather than obscuring them in complexities.

There are the makings of a deal here. Better-off or better-insured people could be told, individually or as a group: Give up your health-care subsidy, and you may opt out of any rationing-type restrictions that the system imposes. And if a few smaller reforms like that don't work, maybe, it will be time for single-payer.