As Keck characterizes it, the South Carolina plan focuses on fixing the health care system, while the Obama administration focuses on fixing the health insurance system.

FORBES: From Nikki Haley: A Post-Election Republican Vision for Healthcare

During his speech, Obama touted changes in the health-care system already passed in his month-old administration as part of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

CNN: Obama calls for health-care reform in 2009

Mr. Starr, who broadly supports the Obama administration's efforts to overhaul the health system, has suggested that Democrats consider a system in which anyone who doesn't get insured can sign away access to the law's subsidies, insurance exchanges for buying policies and guaranteed coverage of pre-existing medical conditions for five years, rather than pay the fee.

WSJ: Insurers Make Plans in Case Health Mandate Is Quashed

When the Clinton administration tried to create a new health-care system, Republicans portrayed it as a looming Frankenstein bureaucracy that would destroy most Americans' high quality of care and usher in the horrors of waiting-lists.

ECONOMIST: Health insurance

The Food and Drug Administration just went through a wave of reforms, and the health care system as as whole is getting rejiggered as a result of a new, broader reform law.

FORBES: Two Ways To Fix The Drug Business

Ben Cardin and President Obama's administration of seeking to bankrupt the nation's future by overhauling the health care system.

CNN: Tough questions, frustrations continue in town halls

Yes, more than a few Democrats will claim that the Veterans Administration health program is the liberal Shangri-la: an integrated single-payer system in which government pays VA doctors directly and owns and runs VA hospitals.

WSJ: Veterans Get Exempted from Health-care Bill

Mr. Baker said that at Thursday's meeting, he suggested the administration work on ways to push states to submit mental-health records into the background-check system, an emerging area of consensus in response to Newtown.

WSJ: Biden's Emerging Gun Plan Draws NRA Ire