Have a little vignette for you, from the john at the Lyons train station (bear with me). In writing about health care, I have often talked about national expectations: Americans expect not to pay for their health care (or at least expect the costs to be well hidden). They are used to having their health care linked to their employment, or to the government. And that is a very hard thing — a very hard tradition — to give up. We expect to pay for our transportation, our food, our clothes, our shelter, etc. — but not our health care.

I have frequently cited the example of bread and butter (making this a bread-and-butter issue?). When you sit down in an American restaurant, they bring you bread and butter. Or, if it does not appear, you ask for it, and it comes — free of charge. In restaurants elsewhere, you don’t get the bread and butter for free. You choose it and pay for it, as for other things. That is the example I have always cited.

Well, I was in the above-mentioned train station yesterday (we’re talkin’ southeastern France). And I now have another example – a better example: You do not expect to pay to go to the bathroom. If you were in an American train station, headed for the john, and were stopped by a man saying, “That’ll be 75 cents, please,” you would say: “What the . . .?”

Maybe that’s not as interesting a story as Larry Craig’s, but it’s mine.