Over the weekend I asked whether there wasn’t some way to speed up the implementation of the reforms once they’re enacted. From a political and policy perspective, this is actually the thing that worries me most — the fact that a lot of the reforms won’t go into effect for five years. A lot of it, it turns out, isn’t just because big reforms take a long time to enact but largely because the delay is helping keep the cost down within the president’s promise of a deficit neutral bill. That strikes me as a potentially disastrous tradeoff since that will leave Dems running in 2010 and 2012 on reform legislation that hardly anyone’s got any benefit from.
In our on-going health care discussion at TPMCafe, Paul Starr suggests some ways to rectify the problem.
