Tour de force

President Clinton's performance last week was politically brilliant and clearly demonstrated why he was elected. Any reader who watched Clinton's address to Congress and town hall performance on Nightline by now should realize how the president has seized the issue by evoking empathy with the concerns of middle Americans for health care security.

Nevertheless, his plan from nearly any other perspective will create another huge entitlement program, with government-mandated budgets and oversight, bureaucracies to accumulate data and crunch numbers, and ultimately, we suspect, the primacy of bean-counting over care-giving...