It’s funny how furrow-browed are the arguments in favor of tax-paid health care for all. We are talking about restoring the high noon of wellness. Where’s the exuberance?

Yet state-scheme dreams seem bound by sobriety. From Pennsylvania to California, their backers tout first their cost-containment. Senator Hillary Clinton’s elect-me health plan announced this week is all about what you’ll have to buy. It seems tailored to sound cautious and spinachy.

Everywhere, the very appeal seems to be that such plans please no one but, if you don’t accept their taxes, worse could happen to you. Not quite the politics of fear, it’s at least the politics of fret.

This may fend off the charge of wild-eyed socialism, but it has drawbacks. Once people start fretting, who knows what they’ll fret about?

In Wisconsin, where one house of the Legislature passed a $15 billion takeover of health-care finance, the closest that backers come to idealism is saying that everyone would have as good a health plan as legislators — even as teachers would perhaps be carved a nicer niche. All others would have to choose among a handful of low-bidder plans selected by the state and paid for by a 15% tax on payrolls.

That this polls well shows the power of worry. People do worry. One story that briefly had legs was from a rookie state lawmaker who said she and her husband, scraping cash to keep their farm afloat, went without insurance. Their son needed an appendectomy; they ended up paying big. If only the rest of us had paid for him instead. As it turns out, the struggling farm couple were also an ex-professor in health policy and a consulting economist who, while lacking money for insurance, found $9,000 to stage a run for state Senate. But in a place that has one of the nation’s highest rates of health coverage and generous care for the not-exactly-poor, worrying sometimes needs a push.

Employers are worried as well. Milwaukee’s health care costs are higher than in comparable Midwestern cities. Backers of the state takeover appeal to this, saying it’s not so much a huge new tax as a way to offload expenses.

The current of fear, however, flows both ways. The plan has been spooking businesses since it acquired a real price tag in June.

For one thing, even if it is a swap of a tax for spiraling premiums, there are still winners and losers. The latter are generally small businesses not spending a lot now. They’d lose any ability to control costs other than by cutting payrolls. The winners would be employers offering atypically high benefits. Remember, the car industry’s big here.

“It gets union groups and teacher groups off the hook,” contends Jon Rauser, an insurance broker who’s started organizing opposition. “It penalizes terribly small business.”

Then there’s the tax. Call it a swap, but it’s high, even in an already high-tax state. That’s what makes the Wisconsin proposal most worth watching: Not only does it control health care to an unusually thorough extent, it would be paid by a tax increase unprecedented in any state.

Measured against the size of the state economy, it’s six times as big as Indiana’s record 2003 tax hike. As a percentage increase, it’s twice the size of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s health care tax that went to flaming ruin, 107-0, in that Legislature in May.

Others have noticed. In Paducah, Ky., business hunters were writing to Wisconsin executives in August suggesting a move south to escape a health-care tax. State lawmakers can be so “insensitive,” read their letter.

Above all, business owners simply seem to doubt the plan’s numbers. Its key presumption is that employers now pay more than 15% of payroll for health care. Many say that’s not even close in the private sector. Mr. Rauser says his clients pay, on average, 7.5%, a figure echoed by business owners. The backers’ math earned openly voiced derision at a chamber of commerce debate in Milwaukee. Even friendly estimates suggest the plan can’t hold its tax at 15%. The nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance warns it could hit 20% in 10 years.

All this is changing the terms of the debate. Early on, backers talked about the scandal of the uninsured. It was assumed that a long debate would help this side — more time for heartrending appendectomy tales.

Instead, time has made price an issue. Time means the details of the plan are being examined by people who aren’t enthusiasts. It’s given guys with payrolls a chance to compare notes.

Not that many of them seem to like the way things are. But oddly, it’s the side with the sweeping plan that projects gloom, with talk of “managing” choices and warnings about making everyone pay “a fair share.” Backers mention Adam Smith, but with minimal deductibles, uniform benefits and control by a state-appointed board, few believe their plan can lend a hand, invisible or not, in restraining costs.

By contrast, it’s the other side that ends up looking idealistic. They talk of transforming health care via markets. Whether people believe this either, I don’t know, but they have a smaller sell job. As time passes, more employees end up on consumer-style plans — even a mid-sized county’s gone to one for all its unionized workers — and live to tell. More businesses, like the Milwaukee MRI clinic selling scans for $600 or the Minneapolis outfit offering price comparisons between doctors, will try making money serving them.

So time itself is making Wisconsin a market in which two directions in reform compete. No wonder the one-big-plan guys are looking so worried.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.