At this blog, we love the health care wonkery. We love the idle talk about what would be the sweetest, kindest, gentlest health care system; a health care system that has free shipping and can also juice an orange. But the primary impediment to health care reform is not an absence of good policy ideas, but a dearth of good political ones. For policy to matter, policy-makers must be willing to advocate it. But many remain timid, scarred by past failures and disappointments, certain that any attempt will end in electoral catastrophe. Haunted, in other words, by the collapse of the Clinton plan in 1994.Over the past couple of months, I've been teasing a larger article on health reform that I've been working on. Today, it's out. The piece is a revisionist history of the 1994 battle, detailing how much of the failure was a product of human error, political misjudgement, and bad luck and timing. 1994 is so often rendered as an inevitable catastrophe, a product of impersonal forces and ineluctable congressional logic, that folks often forget to look at what went wrong, and how those very same errors can be made right, used to inform the next fight for universal health care.The piece is here. Read it. It's like blog homework. I'll be talking about it a lot this week, so if you don't read it, you're going to be all sorts of lost, and you'll do terribly on the quiz.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Ruminatrix.) THE LESSONS OF 1994.
At this blog, we love the health care wonkery. We love the idle talk about what would be the sweetest, kindest, gentlest health care system; a health care system that has free shipping and can also juice an orange. But the primary impediment to health care reform is not an absence of good policy ideas, but a dearth of good political ones. For policy to matter, policy-makers must be willing to advocate it. But many remain timid, scarred by past failures and disappointments, certain that any attempt will end in electoral catastrophe. Haunted, in other words, by the collapse of the Clinton plan in 1994.Over the past couple of months, I've been teasing a larger article on health reform that I've been working on. Today, it's out. The piece is a revisionist history of the 1994 battle, detailing how much of the failure was a product of human error, political misjudgement, and bad luck and timing. 1994 is so often rendered as an inevitable catastrophe, a product of impersonal forces and ineluctable congressional logic, that folks often forget to look at what went wrong, and how those very same errors can be made right, used to inform the next fight for universal health care.The piece is here. Read it. It's like blog homework. I'll be talking about it a lot this week, so if you don't read it, you're going to be all sorts of lost, and you'll do terribly on the quiz.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Ruminatrix.) 
