“The U.S. government now pays for and controls half of the healthcare in America. That is up from less than 10 percent forty years ago. Government spending on healthcare has increased at a rapid rate as its share of healthcare has increased…. During a recent interview, a talk radio host told me that all private health insurance should be eliminated in order to give us all a reason to work together to make sure the government runs a good health care system. My first reaction to that statement was to question how that approach has been working for public education. But I will come back to that. A better analogy would be that conditions in our prisons might be expected to improve if we were all required to live in them.” (06/12/07)