Unlike many of the people who talk with Ezra about setting up a better health care system, I know very little about how you get enough corporate interests behind the proposal. I suppose that when Mark Schmitt talks about "building political groundwork" for getting them behind it, part of what he means is stuff like what Maryland did to Wal-Mart in saddling them with some of the state's health care costs, and thus making them more likely to support some kind of national health care in the long term. I'd like to know more about what things we could do to bring more of these interests to our side.
As far as I can tell, though, the one interest with whom there can be no truce is the health insurance lobby. The horrendous negative-sum game of spending money to push the costs of health care into someone else's lap will have to be eliminated if we're going to get total costs down, and that's basically what these guys do for a living. Any attempt to control this problem will antagonize them and make them blow lots of money on scaring people away from your plan. I propose that we screw them as much as possible.
