Health care reform is still not popular...

...almost a month after the bill was signed into law. It's hard for me to understand. But just as today's Tea Partiers take social security and Medicare for granted (and send their children to public schools), so will tomorrow's angry white geezers consider universal health care a part of their birthright.

In the meantime, I thought I'd dig up one of my favorite pieces on the subject. It wasn't written by Jonathan Cohn or Jonathan Chait of the left-leaning New Republic, nor by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post (Isn't that the same paper that brought down Nixon?), nor even by Paul Krugman of that socialistic, Communistic, atheistic New York Times.

No, one of the more interesting pieces I read in the last year or so was actually written by a guy named Matt Welch, the editor in chief of Reason magazine, a libertarian publication. Its title is "Why I Prefer French Health Care: The U. S. system's deep flaws make socialism more tempting." Huh?

Since nobody ever clicks on these links, I'll just reprint some of the best parts.

To put it plainly, when free marketers warn that Democratic health care initiatives will make us more “like France,” a big part of me says, “I wish.”
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For a dozen years now I’ve led a dual life, spending more than 90 percent of my time and money in the U.S. while receiving 90 percent of my health care in my wife’s native France. On a personal level the comparison is no contest: I’ll take the French experience any day. ObamaCare opponents often warn that a new system will lead to long waiting times, mountains of paperwork, and less choice among doctors. Yet on all three of those counts the French system is significantly better, not worse, than what the U.S. has now.
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What’s more, none of these anecdotes scratches the surface of France’s chief advantage, and the main reason socialized medicine remains a perennial temptation in this country: In France, you are covered, period. It doesn’t depend on your job, it doesn’t depend on a health maintenance organization, and it doesn’t depend on whether you filled out the paperwork right.
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But as you look at the health care solutions discussed in this issue, ask yourself an honest question: Are we better off today, in terms of health policy, than we would have been had we acknowledged more loudly 15 years ago that the status quo is quite awful for a large number of Americans? Would we have been better off focusing less on waiting times in Britain, and more on waiting times in the USA? It’s a question I plan to ask my doctor this Christmas. In French.