I talked yesterday about how liberals are losing the essential arguments for health care in this country. The day before, I went to a forum with Russ Feingold. His speech was mainly on Iraq, but he mentioned that the top domestic concern of his constituents was health care so, when Q&A came, I asked how he'd fix it. His answer shows where we've fallen to. This is paraphrased, but accurate:
I've always been for single payer. In the Senate, it was me and Paul Wellstone, we sponsored the bill. But recently, I came to the same conclusion Paul did towards the end of his life, which is that we need to establish a universal floor, but after that, give each state full autonomy over their programs. We don't need a big federal bureaucracy doing this, we need to rely, instead, on the "genius of the states" and let them experiment and decide what's best.
Let's break that down a bit. He's for single payer. His alliance with Wellstone is used to give that cred. But when he gets into his actual plan, he needs to reinvoke Wellstone because the idea, while progressive in some respects, is quite conservative in others, and is in any case bad. Using Paul's name heads off arguments that it's illiberal.
