Legal Commentary

The Conservative Health Bill

By Big Tent Democrat

Brad DeLong joins E.J. Dionne:

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have an incentive to discuss the Republican roots of Obama's health-care plan. But that doesn't mean they're not real -- and deep.

[. . . T]he essence of the reform -- [. . .] Americans are now being asked not to shirk their responsibilities but rather to act like adults: to take on the burden, to the extent they are financially able, of making sure that when they wind up at the hospital the cost of paying for their care is not loaded onto somebody else's shoulders. The conservative DNA of ObamaCare is hardly a secret. [. . . T]here has been a conspiracy of silence among those working for the bill and those working against it.

(Emphasis supplied.) The fact that is is a conservative bill filled with Republican ideas does not make it bad substantively. But it certainly does make it hard to argue it is the greatest progressive achievement since Medicare. Indeed, that has been a long standing point for me - comparing the health bills to Medicare is absurd. Medicare and Obamacare take two fundamentally different paths. Medicare adopted a public insurance based approach and Obamacare took a regulated private health insurance market approach. One is the progressive approach - Medicare. One is a conservative approach - Obamacare. Whatever the merits of the health bills, surely adherence to progressive ideas on health care is not one of them.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 23, 2010 (boomark / email).