Health care: now on everyone's agenda?

It's encouraging that Bush wants to make expanding health coverage a significant part of his State of the Union, and plans to introduce a new plan.

Not that his proposal is good; the reviews I read seem quite negative, as do the (smarter) observers in the NYT article, and suggest that the main burden of this would fall on the middle class. Of all the issues in politics today, I probably know the least of the intricacies of health care, and I can't claim to know whether or not this will affect the disproportionately large expenses of our country on health care, or the inefficiencies, duplications and price-gouging that plague our private sector. But it's good to see that (thanks in large part to state plans like in Massachusetts and California) the issue is now on everyone's national agenda as an action item of perceived importance to voters.

Now, if we could just achieve that for the environment, like they've done in Canada...