Most of Obama's cabinets appointment will be listening to Barack Obama. They'll offer input, sure, but their fundamental role is to carry out the president's agenda. Larry Summers role will be rather the opposite. Barack Obama will be listening to him. His role is to help the president shape his agenda. So it's useful to read David Leonhardt's guide to What Larry Summers Thinks About Things. There's some interesting bits about Summers newfound concern on inequality. According to Leonhardt, Summers favorite argument is that "to undo the rise in income inequality since the late ’70s, every household in the top 1 percent of the distribution, which makes $1.7 million on average, would need to write a check for $800,000. This money could then be pooled and used to send out a $10,000 check to every household in the bottom 80 percent of the distribution, those making less than $120,000. Only then would the country be as economically equal as it was three decades ago." Interestingly, this basically eviscerates the idea you frequently hear from conservatives that you can't make up the rise in inequality by simply taxing the very rich. As it turns out, you most certainly can. But as you might imagine, I'm going to focus on Summers' opinions on health care. Leonhardt says that Summers believes "the logical next step for health care [is] an expansion of employer-based insurance (as Mr. Obama has proposed) — but in the end, the employer-based system [will] probably fall apart and the government [will] need to insure people." In this, Summers isn't articulating a bold new vision: He's echoing the Democratic consensus. The Obama/Clinton/Edwards/Hacker/Baucus plans all do the same basic thing. With one hand, they spend some money to buttress the existing health care system and erect some new regulations to make it a gentler, more decent place. You do this because people are fundamentally scared of losing what they have right now, and reform needs to speak to their fears, not just the fears of budget and health care wonks. With the other hand, they create a parallel health care system where the government acts as a health insurance superstore: It has a buyer who chooses products based on quality and price, offers an array of competing private and public options, and lets individuals and businesses alike compare coverage options and purchase the insurance that works best for them. At the beginning, this alternative system is fairly small. But the idea is that over time it grows to be quite large, as employers cannot continually absorb the cost of health care and they cannot squeeze out the efficiencies that a government agency with huge market share can demand. In essence, the plan deals with the fears of the public in the short-term but sets up the incentives so that the system moves towards the ideal of the experts in the long-term, which means moving away from employer-based health care.
