Universal Entitlement to Health Care

One of the linguistic inventions of Harvard professor John Dunlop was the term "disjointed incrementalism." Dunlop, former U.S. secretary of labor and an expert on conflict resolution, used it frequently in his lectures to describe the American political style in addressing large public issues. Instead of taking them on in their entirety, he pointed out, our political bodies nearly always nibble at them around the edges, dealing only with the piece of the problem that has high public visibility, causes the most political discomfort, or both.Examples of disjointed incrementalism abound in the health field. Back in the 1960s, Medicare . . .