Health reform and you-tah

I recommend you all read this post in The Fix, a political blog by Washingtonpost.com’s Chris Cillizza.
He talked to Washington insiders to discover which senators are most important to the health care reform debate. Topping the list? Utah’s Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett.
Bennett already has co-sponsored bipartisan health-care legislation, and Hatch is good pals with Ted Kennedy, long a supporter of universal health care.
But “The Fix” says Bennett’s role is complicated by the challenge he’s getting from the right in Utah politics. “Playing a key role in some sort of health care compromise would not sit well with GOP activists in the Beehive State.”
My thoughts? Health reform is much needed in this country. We spend more per capita for health care than any other industrialized country ($5,711 in 2003, for instance, compared to Sweden’s $2,745). (See the figures here.)
But the best reform is one that forces insurers, hospitals and other providers to be totally transparent and that forces true competition.
Everyone ought to be required to be insured, with the currently uninsured and high-risk people placed in a pool from which private insurers will be required to provide coverage on a rotating basis. Public funding probably will be needed to pay for the coverage of people too poor to afford it.
There are no easy answers, and some of you may have better ideas. I firmly believe, however, that a competing “public plan” would be disastrous. The government, with its vast resources, can’t compete fairly with the private sector.
In that sense, I’ll be glad if Hatch and Bennett are the most influential senators in this debate.
What do you think?