Rashi Fein Replies

Few Americans, of whatever political persuasion, would disagree with David Plotke’s four “good things that health care reform should try to do.” My own list of the aims of health financing reform (as distinguished from delivery system reform) includes those and more. (See my “National Health Insurance: Telling the Good from the Bad,” Dissent, Spring 1992). Among the “more” are goals that have been—and, I trust, remain—embedded in the aspirations of the “left.” In that sense, rather than in the senses outlined in Plotke’s first paragraph, we on the left remain predictable. We believe in a system that finances the “basic” coverage that Plotke refers to—our...