(if I were the) King of the Forest

I started this book by announcing I knew how to reform the health-care system; it seems appropriate, then, that I end it with my health-care reform proposal.

Finally, to your warning about the eventual overreaction, to everyone’s detriment, to the creeping problem of general, portable access to health-care: I concur, and have for a long time. I have described this as the revolt of the officially voiceless: people with reasonable, legitimate, but inconvenient concerns – over access to health care, or over welfare, or over affirmative action, or over discrimination, or over campaign financing, or over free speech, or over taxes, or over regulation, or over some other issue – are told by the politicians, by the press, by academics, by the arbiters of social norms that they are heartless, or bigoted, or ignorant, or unreasonable, or unrealistic, or hateful; they are told that their concerns do not really exist, or are parochial, or are irrelevant, or must be borne with stoicism on behalf of some greater good; they are told they are unworthy of attention and respect; they are told, in effect, to shut up. And they do shut up – while their problems fester and swell, with animosity added to inconvenience – until they are, in the over-used phrase, “Mad as hell, and not going to take it any more.” And then we all suffer as the sledge-hammer solutions born of this groundswell of frustration create new problems and new animosities.

In the beginning of 1997 the government of San Francisco initiated a new policy: henceforth, all organizations which have any contractual relationship with the city must offer the same benefits to ‘domestic partners’ as they do to spouses. For the uninitiated, a ‘domestic partner’ is someone with whom you have a long-term, committed, live-in (but not legally-binding) relationship; in San Francisco this typically (but not necessarily) means a gay relationship for which a formal marriage is simply not available.
The policy is a noble attempt to reward loving, committed, stable relationships, whether or not they fit the traditional mold. It is also an act of hubris, perhaps even rising to the level of cultural imperialism: the law seeks to extend this policy beyond San Francisco to wherever any city contractor operates, from San Mateo, CA, to Atlanta, GA, to every major airport in the world (United Airlines, which has a major hub in San Francisco, is thereby considered to have a city contract, and was notified it must comply across the board), and even to the Vatican (the catholic church, which ducked the issue by offering benefits to “any member of an employee’s household”, operates much of the city’s social safety net). Imagine the citizens of Little Rock or Des Moines trying to enforce a ban on benefits for domestic partners in San Francisco…