Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, might serve as a model for other politicians when it comes to health care. Here's what he told a writer from the Wall Street Journal [ellipses in the original]

"Our contention has been that the fatal flaw with our health-care system is that someone else pays. And as long as someone else pays, there is unlimited demand for a product . . . someone is going to cap it. It's just a question of who it is going to be? A government bureaucrat? An HMO bureaucrat? Or is it going to be you? But it is going to be somebody, because we can't keep growing health care at double digits and expect to be competitive. . . .

"So we were the second state in the nation to offer health savings accounts to all state workers and all state retirees. We got that one through. We are the first state in the nation to be offering the health care choice system [for Medicaid]. . . that offers everything from traditional fee-for-service to HMOs to PPOs, but the big one that I like is the individual health savings accounts."

There's a long road until health care policy is made sane, but offering a new set of options for state workers is a place to start.