To me, the biggest concern that’s not getting talked about are the delays to implementation contained in most potential versions of the legislation. Great stuff that gets implemented in 2014 may get snuffed out in 2010 or 2012. Here’s where the politics becomes inseparable from the policy. And I do fear there’s too little recognition of that.
From TPM Reader TD …
As fed up as I am with this blundering HCR process, I agree that “burning it down” is not a viable option. That’s the one sure path to electoral punishment. However, I am worried about the equally dangerous idea that “if we just pass something” everything will be okay. The truth is we’re not going to have much to sell to the public in 2010 since whatever we pass is going to be defined by triggers and thresholds and formulas and so forth. This strikes me as politically foolish. I’d rather see a less ambitious bill with more immediate impact than a more ambitious one with delayed impact. It looks like what we’re going to get the worst of both worlds: an unambitious bill with delayed impact. In the end, this is a pocketbook issue with unusual urgency given economic conditions.
Americans pay two or three times as much per capita for health care than our industrialized peers, and more are going without insurance than ever before. If our HCR allows so much as one more year of rising premiums, it will be judged a failure in the eyes of many next June and July when new policies are put forth by employers. (I can already hear the grouses in my office.) We’d have been better off to approach HCR in the same way we do a minimum wage hike or an unemployment benefits extension–that is, something to help worried Americans right now. Instead, we framed it as another step toward abstract social justice. Obama should be on TV, railing at Congress for allowing hard-working Americans to languish while they engage in petty bickering and horse trading when more Americans are hurting than at any other point in our lifetimes.
