Progressives vs. democracy: the health care debate reveals a nasty tendency thin liberal politics.

AuthorDoherty, Brian

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AT PRESS TIME, the House-Senate reconciliation over some version of a health care bill was still lurching along. Although key details were changing daily, one fact has remained constant: Any legislation that might end up passing through the Democrat-controlled Congress will involve enormous new government subsidies, onerous mandates on private insurance companies (and their customers), and tighter government controls on a large and growing percentage of the U.S. economy.

Yet the process has already proven to be an unconscionable disappointment to many liberal legislators and commentators. Their increasingly shrill reaction to the debate has revealed a disturbing strain of American political thought that cannot comprehend how anyone could disagree with a big-government solution to health care without being evil, stupid, insane, or all three. Faced with the infuriating complication of democratic dissent, advocates of greater government involvement in health care, including some federal officials, have unleashed a vicious campaign against a sizable political minority.

For many, the Obama administration botched reform from the get-go by ruling out one longstanding progressive goal: a universal "single payer" system, in which the government spends every health care dollar, instead of the current 50 percent, with no competitive market in medical insurance at all. "In the real world," declared the incendiary Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi, who combines HunterThompson-style invective with policy wonkery, "nothing except a single-payer system makes any sense" Having to live in our allegedly nonsensical world has driven single-payer enthusiasts mad.

Their consolation prize was supposed to be a "public option," a government-run insurance plan that all Americans could buy into (not just the elderly and poor, as with existing Medicare and Medicaid), theoretically outcompeting private insurers on both cost containment and care quality. But when the on-again, off-again public option appeared (prematurely, it turned out) to have died in the fall, it was, Taibbi wrote in October, "the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad."

Such uncomprehending hyperbole is not limited to opinion journalism, and it has been only sporadically directed at the people who actually hold power. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in July slammed health insurers--who have largely supported and helped shape most reform efforts this political season--as "immoral ... villains," even while she continued to back plans that would force every American to buy insurance from them. Pelosi's counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), called the many U.S. citizens who spoke out...

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