WHAT would make sense?

Politically, we probably have reached a time when the government has to mandate health care coverage for everyone. It could do that simply by requiring every taxpayer to attach to his federal tax return a certificate of coverage for him and his dependents. (Non-taxpayers would get medical care through a pool funded in any of various ways.) Then private insurance carriers would compete to sell state-sanctioned plans at the lowest costs for a multitude of coverage ranges.

That sounds a lot like the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan under which congresspersons and presidents buy their medical coverage.

Bingo. Very much like that - and there was a time when Obama was suggesting it, but apparently not anymore. If such an arrangement is good for lofty congresspersons and presidents, is it too good for the everyday rest of us?

Wow. A plan already in place - and used by the president himself. Why isn't he using it as a model for the country?

Because he is a statist at heart - and he has the popular support and the votes in Congress to socialize medicine on the European model. And despite his tendency to complexify things and conceal them in an inky rhetorical cloud, that's clearly what he wants to do - and that's what we're likely to get, and don't bring up the new taxes that will be imposed in its name.

Complexify, Europeanize, socialize?

Indeed. With the consequent rationing that defines care restrictions and price controls - and the tearing up of the private doctor-patient contract that is the essence of American medicine. That's the freight train rushing at us.

Your father actually foresaw this?

He did - and in many ways the train already has arrived, which helps explain the smoldering fury of many of the nation's physicians. The new regime seems set on replacing private medicine with government medicine. In the slang acronym, we face a HICA moment.

HICA?

For Here It Comes Again.