I'll try and say a bit more about this later, but Jacob Hacker's Slate piece on how to fix our health care system is very good. It's also very misleading. While he sets his plan up in opposition to a single-payer system proposed by John Conyers, that plan has neither support nor even a slim chance of enactment. The Dingell/Kennedy bill, which doesn't eliminate private insurance, is only a bit less unlikely. More serious is Pete Stark's plan -- which I seem to remember Hacker had a hand in -- and Russ Feingold's idea to set up pilot universal programs across the states.
So do read Hacker's piece -- his model system looks much like mine -- but don't buy into all the atmospherics of liberal unanimity on single payer. I follow this stuff pretty damn closely and I don't know a single staffer, think tanker, operative or activist who seriously thinks there's a chance we'll abolish the private sector in health care. Hell, I don't even know very many who think doing so would be a good thing. Hacker is playing a political game here, making his seriously lefty proposal look moderate by setting it up in opposition to unserious, totally marginal lefty proposals.
On a strategic level, that's all for the good when politicians do it out of necessity, but I don't know that author and political scientist Jacob Hacker needs to be playing that game. Particularly in Slate, which has elevated the wild-eyed conception of the Democratic Party to near canonical status. The worry is that folks will actually think the left is addled on health care when, in fact, it's sadly more pragmatic and incremental than even Jacob Hacker. So while I agree with the article's subhead of "Fixing the left's health-care prescription," Hacker's actually attacking from the wrong end. The left's health care prescription is wrong, but not because they listen too much to Kennedy and Dingell and, for that matter, Hacker, but because they listen too little.
