The left now seems to have divided itself up into two camps. There are those, like Howard Dean and Markos Moulitsas, who are arguing to scrap the Senate health care reform bill and those, like Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein, who assert that even the stripped down Senate bill is a big step towards reform and deserves to be passed.
Yesterday, Time's Joe Klein weighed in to do some scolding:
This issue is just too serious for preening or ranting. There are millions of poor people who have no health insurance--tens of thousands of them with serious illnesses--who will be subsidized to buy health insurance and able to receive both preventive and chronic care for the first time if this imperfect bill passes. This is a massive move toward progressivity, an enormous new entitlement for the working poor. The opposition by Republicans was no surprise, nor was the chicanery of a few Democratic conservatives in the Senate, but I'm just dumbstruck by those on the left who would oppose this for whatever ideological fetishes they imagine are being traduced. It is simply amazing and absolutely disgraceful. Grow up.
While, at least at his moment, I tend to align more with the Chait and Klein view that something is better than nothing. The old "play the hand you're dealt" rationale. But Klein's little admonition above is short sided and a pretty lousy justification for the current Senate bill.
First, try to ignore Klein's first sentence; the one where he criticizes concerned Democrats for "preening" and "ranting" and then proceeds to preen and rant for the next paragraph.
There is, as Klein notes, something to praise in even the watered down Senate version of the health care bill; subsidies to the poor to purchase insurance. It is, as Klein calls it, "a massive move towards progressivity". But Klein seems to be arguing that these subsidies, in and of themselves, is the reason to move forward with the Senate bill.
Once again, the objectives for health care reform were expanding coverage and lowering costs. While the Senate bill, in it's most current form, does address expanding coverage with the subsidies, it doesn't do enough to address costs. The Senate bill essentially hands private insurers millions of new customers mandated to purchase their coverage, eliminates those nasty tricks private insurance companies claim lower their costs (rescission, annual or lifetime caps, denial of benefits, etc.), and lacks any substantive means of regulating the price of that insurance.
Klein also seems to be confused about who health care reform will benefit; certainly the 30 million or so that are currently without coverage, but the intent ought to be to improve the service for the other 270 million of us as well. It takes about thirty seconds worth of Google searches to see the effects of an overly expensive and underperforming health care system; wage stagnation, lack of global competitiveness, bankruptcy, etc. These are issues that effect all 300 million of us, not just the 30 million that now do without.
It may be the wise thing to pass the Senate bill and call it a win. But the game is only in early innings.
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