The evidence suggests that people like government-run health care systems. Medicare has much higher satisfaction ratings than private insurance. Americans are much less satisfied with their health system than they are in other countries. And the differences are significant:
As such, many on the right have a very simple fear about health care reform: It will work, and it will prove popular. Amanda Marcotte catches James Pethokoukis putting it simply:
As such, many on the right have a very simple fear about health care reform: It will work, and it will prove popular. Amanda Marcotte catches James Pethokoukis putting it simply:Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: “Blocking Obama’s health plan is key to the GOP’s survival.”Ramesh Ponnuru takes up much the same argument, but tries to twist away from the implications by suggesting that Americans wouldn't like government health care, but would want to keep it and expand it anyway. That doesn't fit with the evidence, but I'll allow it as a necessary self-deception. To deploy an idea from yesterday, this is probably wrong as a question of political realignment. Seniors have Medicare and Social Security, and they were the only age demographic that favored McCain. But as a question of policy realignment, it's almost certainly true: Seniors like their government programs, and so the GOP is stuck paying false fealty to a set of institutions that would make Friedrich Hayek weep. Seniors might vote Republican, but they're too invested in Medicare to ever be conservative. We'd probably see much the same thing with a universal health care system, which would almost certainly work better than what we have now, and would not only entrench itself on the American landscape, but deal a stiff blow to the reflexive anti-statism of the GOP.But that's not to totally deride the political logic of opposition. If enacting a national health care program wouldn't strengthen Democrats for a long time, it would almost certainly strengthen the Democrats for a short time. It's easy to run on policy success and hard to run on policy failure. That said, this also gets the causality backwards, a bit: If Democrats were to pass universal health care, it would mean they were already enormously strong, and fairly popular, and that the GOP was quite weak, and fractured. In that context, successful reform would only cement the political dynamics of the moment. This, incidentally, is the real reason health reform is so hard. It's not opposition from the industry, which fears for its profits. It's opposition from the minority, which fears for its relevance.
