By Ezra
Opposition to single-payer health care and muddled plans like [the Hacker plan] or the Wyden one will be the same in intensity. And this one is weird and complicated, like every other plan that isn't single-payer. This is an issue for the voters. We will have to go to the voters and basically ask them to vote to end the health insurance industry. Barring that, and you're just not serious about universal health care.
Yikes. Can Stoller really mean that? The last time the "seriousness" attack was in vogue was the run-up to the Iraq War -- either you were for invading Iraq, or you weren't serious about the War on Terra'. This conversation -- particularly when between progressives -- should operate on higher ground.
So first, let's get something straight. This isn't about "universal" health care. Absolutely nobody who's "serious" about these issues thinks the insurance industry itself is the main barrier blocking universal health care. The insurance industry, after all, has a plan for universal health care, and it would work just fine: We, the taxpayers, would pay them to insure everyone. Universality achieved! And believe me, they would love it.
The reason this country lacks a universal health system is that progressive reformers have been unwilling to sacrifice a just, decent, affordable, humane system for a merely universal one. Universality, after all, is easy. Widespread cost control and quality are not. And demanding a perfect system is easy. But as Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton have found, achieving such a system is not. Now, the argument over which type of system is the most worthwhile, and which sort the most possible, is a worthy one, and it's perfectly defensible to argue -- as Stoller does -- for nationalized care in that context. But to accuse Hacker, and Wyden, and Pete #*$&*% Stark, and so many others who've devoted their lives to the study and struggle of this issue "unserious" because they don't believe we'll dissolve the multibillion dollar insurance industry in a single legislative penstroke is profoundly, well, unserious.
