The question is not whether to provide universal health care but whether to do it by means of universal health insurance. Most people agree that the present system of providing health care to uninsured people is suboptimal. But many people think that trying to provide it by requiring insurers to cover people who their actuarial analyses indicate are bad risks doesn't work.

Every system of providing care falls short of the goal of providing everybody with all the care they want at no cost to anybody. no system is genuinely "universal."