Perhaps you saw the front-page headline in Tuesday's newspaper — "Fee idea for health insurers is floated." The story said that the Senate Finance Committee, which was described as the last best hope for a bipartisan bill on health care reform, was considering a plan that would impose a fee on insurance companies to help cover the cost of insuring the uninsured.

Stephen Radinsky saw that story. He called me and asked if I had seen it. I glanced at it, I said. I read it hurriedly.

"It's our plan," he said. "It's the plan Rabbi Talve and I spoke with you about."

That was more than four years ago. The three of us had met at Central Reform Congregation. Rabbi Susan Talve and Radinsky had an ambitious idea. Actually, the idea belonged to a man in Maryland, Vinnie DeMarco. He is either a selfless reformer or a socialist, depending on which blog you read.

He managed to get a bill through his state Legislature to eliminate the exemption HMOs had from a 2 percent tax on premiums, a tax other Maryland health insurance companies paid. The money from that new revenue was then used to increase reimbursements to doctors for Medicaid, which had the effect of increasing the number of doctors who would take Medicaid patients.

When Radinsky and Talve learned that Missouri exempted HMOs from a similar tax on premiums, they decided to try to copy DeMarco's success, but with a twist. Revenue would go to provide health insurance for young adults between the ages of 18 and 25.

That seemed like a good group. First of all, it was a group that tended to need insurance. They had aged out of their parents' policies, and many of them had jobs that did not provide health insurance. Second, this was a relatively cheap group to insure.

It seemed like an easy first step toward health care reform. That was a subject that interested both Talve and Radinsky.

Talve had a daughter with a congenital heart defect, a condition that had once caused an insurance company to cancel the family's health insurance. Several months later, the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act authorized small companies to purchase group policies, and Talve and her family were able to get a policy through the synagogue. So Talve understood both the fear of not having insurance and the power of regulation.

Radinsky was a radiologist. At the insistence of his office manager, Ruthie Daerda, he did some charity work for the state. One day a mammogram showed a problem. Radinsky informed the patient. She shrugged and said calmly that she didn't have health insurance. "I didn't know what to do," Radinsky said. "I just had no idea."

That was years ago. By the time he and Talve got together, he was retired. But he had that woman, whose name and fate he did not know, in his mind when he and Talve decided to bring a modified version of DeMarco's plan to Missouri.

They called a legislator and got help writing a bill. Then they called me. A little publicity might help their effort.

So I met with them and listened to their plans and their stories and gave them a vague assurance that I would write something. I did not. Something came up, and then something else.

They took their bill to Jefferson City, and sympathetic legislators introduced it in both the House and Senate. Nothing happened in the House, but there was actually a committee hearing in the Senate. Talve and Radinsky went to the hearing, and they were surprised to see how many people attended. They were lobbyists. The bill never came up for a vote.

They tried again the next year but had no more success.

So they founded something called Missouri Health Care for All. It's supposed to be a grass-roots, nonpartisan group dedicated to health care reform. Its roster of endorsing organizations runs heavily toward churches, synagogues and other groups with religious affiliations. At one of their first big meetings, the guest speaker was DeMarco. He believes in the power of coalitions and incremental change.

That formula makes sense to Talve.

"Next time we go to Jefferson City, we want people behind us," she said when I spoke with her and Radinsky last week.

They both shook their heads at the thought that the Senate Finance Committee is considering a variation of a plan with which they had such little success in Jefferson City.

"It seemed like win-win for everybody," Talve said.

Radinsky spoke again about the woman with the abnormality on her mammogram.

"I see her in my dreams," he said.