A public plan will reduce costs and improve access.

Newsweek, May, 2009 by Tom Daschle

I have baseball on my mind: It is spring, the teams are on the field, the season has begun. It seems to me that winning the health-care debate is a lot like the Chicago Cubs’ winning the World Series—it hasn’t happened in forever, and some proponents are hearing the same old refrain of “Wait till next year.”

This is usually a safe bet; we have never won the World Series of health care. The last time we even won a big game was in 1997, with the passage of the Children’s Health Insurance Plan. Before that, you have to go back to 1965, when we won Medicare and Medicaid.

Those were hard-fought victories, and the opposition then is familiar now. Our current debate has focused on whether reform should offer the choice of a public health-insurance plan. Many of the same...

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