Building a consensus for expanding health coverage

Despite a flourishing economy and recent growth in employment-based health coverage, forty-three million Americans remain uninsured. Extending coverage to the uninsured is not an intractable public policy problem but could be addressed if the various health care stakeholders could only find common ground. We argue that to win broad-based support from across the ideological and political spectra, a meaningful proposal should achieve a balance between public- and private-sector approaches, focus attention on those who are most in need of assistance (low-income workers), and build on systems that work today. With the aim of pulling together a political coalition, we present a proposal specific enough to attract support but whose details will arise later, in the context of the legislative process.