Mayo Clinic Calls for Universal Coverage

From the (excellent) Wall Street Journal Health Blog

Make everybody in America buy health insurance, and give subsidies to help the poor afford it. Force insurance companies to offer some coverage to everyone, regardless of health status. And have everybody buy their insurance directly, rather than getting it through their employer.

Those are the broad outlines of a plan (described here) created by the Mayo Clinic’s Health Policy Center after consulting with hundreds of academics, patient activists and health-care providers in the last year and a half. The group also got input from executives at companies such as Wal-Mart and Verizon that are not part of the health-care industry.