Whither the Moral Argument or: Why It Was Always Going To End Up This Way
At a certain point of the health care debate, when it looked like the Democrats were struggling to win broad public support, many liberal pundits tried to rehabilitate the “moral” argument for health care reform. The idea was that, while the Obama health care push was laudatory and that the bill was a great improvement over the status quo, the strategy Obama using was wrong. His wasn’t getting enough broad support because his focus on “bending the curve” — using health care reform to slow the growth in health care spending which, unchecked, would bankrupt the country — couldn’t get any traction. So, they argued, we should emphasize what a disaster our current system is for the uninsured and why it was an urgent moral failing.
Now, Max Baucus is always talking about bending the curve. He has emphasized over and over how important it is that any bill be, ultimately, deficit reducing. And now the CBO has scored the most recent Baucus bill and found that, it’s well, deficit negative. Maybe not entirely cost-curving, but surely good enough for Obama and Baucus. It also basically covers everyone. But, wait, Ezra Klein says, as he’s been saying for a while, that it’s also incredibly incremental. As he puts it, the bill “leaves 245 million non-elderly Americans who will pretty much be in the exact place they would’ve been otherwise.” Yet, Klein, like many others, is disappointed that a more ambitious and comprehensive bill isn’t in the offing and probably isn’t even possible.
But I think the fact that such a bill — which spends a lot of money to cover the uninsured but otherwise leaves most of the health care status quo intact — is probably going to be the bill, and will ultimately win support from the center-left and left is due tot he fact that leftie health care advocates, who tend to also be single payer supporters, have really been making an explicitly moral argument. It’s almost a weird coincidence that during the years where any universal health insurance was impossible (1995-2009), those who were most loudly insisting on universal health care were also wedded to one of the most radical methods of achieving such reform. In short, a world where what people really care about is universal coverage, something like the Baucus bill will end up being the means that universal coverage is achieved. It is, since it must go through the 60 vote senate, the Finance committee and get signed off by the interests which control health care policy, the way of achieving the most basic health care reform goal (covering the uninsured) that has the least resistance.
