Pop quiz -- what Euro-loving, Bush-bashing, ultra-liberal wacko said the following:

"...the truth is that the best national health-insurance programs do not bear out the horror stories that conservatives like to tell about them."

Michael Moore? Paul Krugman? Ezra Klein? Me? Er, no. Those words came from conservative journalist Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in the latest issue of National Review. And it's not as strange as it sounds. People often ask me if there are conservative journalists I enjoy reading. My answer usually includes Ramesh -- and it's not because he agrees with me on health care generally (he doesn't, as you'll soon see) or the fact he kindly referred to me as both "scrupulous" and "indefatigable" in this particular article. Rather, it's because the articles of his that I've read are generally thoughtful -- indicative, I think, of somebody who's genuinely interested in solving problems, albeit in ways consistent with his own philosophical views. Sometimes he makes mistakes. That's pretty common. (I make plenty!) But he also admits those mistakes and corrects them. That's not so common. His new article on health care is consistent with this pattern. (Subscriber only link here.) It is dispassionate and non-hysterical. Not only does it recognize the essential dysfunctions in American health care. It also recognizes the essential dysfunctions (well, one essential dysfunction) of private health insurance in general: namely, the problem of cherry-picking and adverse selection. Many conservatives suggest that if we just junked the employer-sponsored health insurance, we'd finally get to a perfect health insurance market -- seemingly oblivious to the fact that people with pre-existing conditions would struggle to find any coverage and even those in good health might have a hard time shopping around for policies intelligently. Ramesh acknowledges that this is a problem, although he doesn't really offer much in the way of a solution. That's no small failing. Indeed, lest I make him a pariah among his fellow conservatives, I should mention that -- despite the observations above -- he remains opposed to universal health insurance. And, in order to make his case, I think he puts forward several unpersuasive arguments. Ezra has already dispensed with one: this myth that frivolous mandates are a major reason health insurance has gotten so expensive. Ramesh also invokes an argument that I've always found a bit unfair: the suggestion that those of us who champion Medicare as a model of successful government-run health insurance ignore its huge cost. Nothing could be further from the truth. We're well aware of the huge costs Medicare imposes on our society. It's just that we're also aware of the even huger cost private insurance imposes. Indeed, that's one of the big reasons we like Medicare so much. It's less expensive than private sector alternatives. If we can capture even some of those efficiencies by using Medicare (or something like it) to cover all of the non-elderly, we'll have a much easier time paying for health care in the future. In discussing the success of foreign systems abroad, Ramesh also notes that the most successful ones -- whether you're talking France, Germany, or Switzerland -- have some sort of private-sector component. I hear this argument all the time. And I agree completely with the factual premise. I just don't get how it confounds the case for universal health insurance. Many advocates of single-payer health insurance would allow for some private-sector insurance, either as an opt-out or a supplement on the government policy. (That's what you have in France and Germany.) And plenty of other universal health care advocates would be perfectly happy with a functioning system of universal private insurance -- say, like the plan the Clintons proposed in 1993 and Senator Ron Wyden has on the table right now. Indeed, the most important divide in the health care debate isn't between those who favor government-run versus private health insurance. It's between those who favor a universal system that gets everybody into one risk pool and those who oppose such systems. This is a point Ed Kilgore made some time ago. And it's a point Ramesh himself makes, when he explains -- correctly -- that the essential impulse of liberal reformers like me is to spread the financial risks of illness to the entire population, rather than dividing it up into segments so that different groups (of varying medical risks) end up subsidizing themselves independently. I (may) have more to say on this article, or at least some of the other arguments it invokes, later. Meantime, the next time you hear some right-winger trot out a horror story about universal health care abroad, you can tell them universal health care really isn't so bad -- because Ramesh Ponnuru told you so. --Jonathan Cohn