...

4. Make an all-out attempt to limit deaths by hospital infection and the simple failure of doctors to wash their hands and perform other medically obvious procedures.

5. Make an all-out attempt, working with state and local governments (recall, since the Feds are picking up the Medicaid tab they have temporary leverage here), to ease the spread of low-cost, walk-in health care clinics, run on a WalMart sort of basis. Stepping into the realm of the less feasible, weaken medical licensing and greatly expand the roles of nurses, paramedics, and pharmacists.

6. Make an all-out attempt, comparable to the moon landing effort if need be, to introduce price transparency for medical services. This can be done.

7. Preserve current HSAs. The Obama plan will tank them, yet HSAs, while sometimes overrated, do boost pending discipline. They also keep open some path of getting to the Singapore system in the future.

8. Invest more in pandemic preparation. By now it should be obvious how critical this is. It's fine to say "Obama is already working on this issue" but the fiscal constraint apparently binds and at the margin this should get more attention than jerry rigging all the subsidies and mandates and the like.

9. Establish the principle that future extensions of coverage, as done through government, will be for catastrophic care only.

10. Enforce current laws against fraudulent rescission. If these cases are so clear cut and so obviously in the wrong, let's act on it. We can strengthen the legal penalties if need be.

11. Realize that you cannot tack "universal coverage" (which by the way it isn't) onto the current sprawling mess of a system, so look for all other means of saving lives in other, more cost-effective ways. If you wish, as a kind of default position, opt for universal coverage if the elderly agree to give up Medicare, moving us to a version of the Swiss system and a truly unified method of coverage. But don't bet on that ever happening.

(As an aside, I *hate* the term "health care." It's not health care. It's *medical* care.) Via Marginal Revolution: What should we do instead of the Obama health reform bill?.