dajafi wrote:Thinking a little more about the possibilities for compromise on the health care bill... while I don't doubt that there's considerable principled opposition to the bill among Republicans, I suspect [url=http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/what_do_conservatives_believe.html]]those arguing that in the historical context of the health care debate this is a pretty solidly center-right bill are correct.
[/url]Perhaps it takes someone very familiar with liberal health-care reform ideas to say this, but this is not a liberal bill. Liberals believe access to medical care is a public good that should be provided by the public sector. The sop to that approach was the public option, which isn't even in the final law. That's why every time someone terms this socialism, I fantasize about Karl Marx, or maybe William Beveridge, stepping out Marshall McLuhan-style and saying, "You know nothing of my work!"
This bill is Clintonian: It achieves liberal ends through market means, and since conservatives frequently claim they are also in favor of access to medical care, it's not even clear that near-universal coverage can properly be called a liberal end. Not to mention that it's more conservative than the Great Triangulator himself was: It doesn't resemble his reforms so much as the Republican alternative to his reforms. But Democrats haven't gotten credit for that, in part because the opposition of Republicans meant they had to keep their liberals onboard, and that cut against trumpeting the conservative structure of the legislation.
But if President Mitt Romney had proposed this bill, a substantial number among his party would have stood with him on it, and no one would have trouble identifying what was conservative within it. And, to be fair, many Democrats would have fought the legislation every step of the way.
I don't know whether or not this is true, but if there's been a coherent or compelling response from Romney or other defenders of the MA plan (I wouldn't ask Scott Brown for one, as I suspect he'd just start pole-dancing or something) to the charge that Obamacare=Romneycare, I haven't heard it. (If you have, please link--maybe I missed it.)
At the same time, while some Republicans did propose health care reforms, their common theme was solely in the direction of cost controls, not better health. To paraphrase this piece, the Republican health care plans amounted to protect the wallets of the healthy and wealthy from the misfortunes of the sick and poor. That's not a framework that easily accommodates compromise, even before you throw in the full-press hyperbolizing of the bill's awfulness and eevil socialism and all the rest. I can buy that principle for a lot of Republicans was as much a part of the "ONLY try to kill it" strategy as politics was.
About the best that Romney has done in explaining his flip-flop is to alternate between the excuses that his plan was better, because it was implemented at the state rather than national level and the plan that he proposed was marginally different than what the legislature adopted
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