Legal Commentary

"Progressive" Reform

By Big Tent Democrat

Ezra Klein:

What you're seeing here is the tension between being a conservative and being a Republican. It's not that you can't be both at the same time, but that you have to know which wins when ideological push comes to electoral shove. [. . . The health reforms] were defined as conservative as recently as two or three years ago. [. . . ]

The way [the health bills] saved money -- cuts to Medicare and a tax that rolled back the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance -- were conservative as well. Cutting Medicare and ending that tax break are, for instance, the keys to Rep. Paul Ryan's alternative budget proposal.

[. . . T]here was no doubt the bill looked like the reforms Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts and that the conservative Heritage Foundation advocated in the early Aughts. There's no doubt that it was more ideologically conservative than any major reform bill that had come before it. [. . . ] If Republicans had cut a deal on revenue, we could've capped the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance and there would've been no increase in Medicare payroll taxes. Health savings accounts and tort reform could've been much larger parts of the bill. [. . .] If Republicans had offered 40 real votes for Wyden-Bennett, I would've been on their side in this debate. [. . .] There's definitely no way to square [conservative] past preferences and the rhetoric they abetted this time around. And in the final analysis, the bill is worse -- both from their perspective and mine -- for that opposition.

(Emphasis supplied.) My biggest beef with Ezra Klein was always the disingenuous image he cultivated as the progressive voice on health care reform. He is no progressive on health care reform. He readily admits it here. This does not mean he is wrong in his views. (My views on foreign policy and preventive detention are hardly progressive. But I do not present them as such.) Just that he was not progressive (neither was Obama.) And the health bills are simply a progressive loss on the issue of reform (the expansion of Medicaid is clearly a progressive triumph.)

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 26, 2010 (boomark / email).

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