Another Reason to Reach Bipartisan Solutions
The words of Ezra Klein last Tuesday:
The Senate passed the Continuing Resolution 79-16 this afternoon. Another way of saying that: The Senate voted to defund the implementation of both health-care reform and financial-regulation reform…..
[T]his is bad news for the health-care bill and the financial-regulation bill. There’s been a tendency to assume that the universe of options for passed legislation was binary: Either they went forward, or they get repealed. But with an angrily divided government, we may find ourselves in that little-known middle category: The Republicans can’t repeal them and the Democrats can’t fully fund them, and so rather than simply going forward, they limp forward.
Whether going or limping, we must stop this takeover and destruction of the best quality health system in the world. Our personal freedom, health innovation and entire economy is at stake. No nation can afford nor effectively provide the quality of health without bancrupting itself and setting itself up to say who lives and who dies.
Megan McArdle said the other day, what is the point in passing a health reform law that requires for its success that the other party go away? Brilliant point.
Amen.
I still can’t figure out why the Democrats passed a bill that not a single Republican supported. What was the point?
The EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations scheduled to take effect Jan. 2, 2011, is another initiative that seems likely to limp along with a lack of funding.
And what are the states going to do on health care after they run through the $5 billion in federal subsidies for high-risk pools?
I don’t believe the House and Senate leadership really thought out the implications of forcing health reform legislation through Congress without the support of moderate Republicans. Democrats felt confident that that legislation would grow on the American public once it was passed. Yet the legislation was complicated; very hard to explain; and 85% of the public already liked the health coverage they had.
Now Congress has missed a historic opportunity to reform health care in a way that Americans would support.
The left’s strategy is to create interest groups. Once they are on the dole, cutting anything becomes very difficult. If one’s goal is to end private medicine in the U.S., ObamaCare did a fine job. It is unlikely that the right will go to war with the interest groups anytime soon, especially over the exchanges or Medicaid expansion, so some large chunk of care will ultimately be nationalized. A decade or so from now, the left will go after another chunk.
The same strategy has been used to expand Medicaid in the states.