We won’t adjust entitlement spending-voters are too stupid and selfish to do that.

And we can’t do modest health reform. Modest doesn’t work. You can’t limit preexisting conditions without universal coverage-no one would carry insurance until they get sick.

There is no way to read your post and not think, “Yeah, this system is WAY sub-optimal.” 30 (or 45) million uninsured is just lousy any way you slice it. The fact that most of these uninsured are young and healthy doesn’t change the fact that 1) some aren’t and 2) you can go from young and healthy to young and deathly ill in a blink.

So when you suggest universal health insurance as a moral imperative, I sympathize. My problem is that, just as nine years ago President Bush enshrined massive tax relief without asking for any sacrifice in return, today President Obama is suggesting the creation of a new entitlement with absolutely no sacrifice save from our kids and grandkids who are, again, being asked to foot the bill.

If the President really wanted to lead, he would couple a more modest (and thus affordable) expansion in health insurance with an increase in the retirement age, means testing, re-adjustic COLAs and other elements of an entitlement reform package that could actually make a dent in our overall budgetary outlook.

But to pass this bill absent major fiscal reforms and actual cost-cutting remedies for health spending instead of the President’s gimmickry is unjust, because it consigns our kids to the modern equivalent of debtor’s prison.

I feel you, Steve, truly I do. Lord knows a world with fewer Steve Goldmans is barely worth contemplating. Can we just do it right, though?