Here's the Washington Post editorial page chief:

Broadly speaking, we know how to insure most Americans: Order them to get insurance, help pay for those who can't afford it and tell insurance companies to enroll anyone who asks.

Hiatt doesn't seem to have even considered using either the Veterans Health Administration or Medicare as a model instead. Which is odd, since they already exist and, by most accounts, work rather well.

Hiatt goes on to complain about the cost of health care reform -- which makes his refusal to consider other models all the more odd. After all, the Lewin Group has found that Rep. Pete Stark's proposal, for example, would produce the greatest overall savings:

Though Rep. Stark's AmeriCare bill is the most expensive to the federal government, it provides the biggest overall health savings, lowering projected national expenditures by $58 billion (Figure ES-4). It achieves this by significantly lowering the costs of insurance administration by covering most people through a program like Medicare, which has substantially lower administrative costs than private insurance.

So even as Hiatt portrays universal health care as too expensive, he ignores proposals that would do the most to cut costs.