Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Frank Pasquale
If there's one thing our elite press corps loves, it's centrism. They cling to a romantic ideal of bipartisanship--even when they're discussing
necessarily ideological endeavors like health care reform. Thus it comes as no surprise when the
NYT's Herzensohn & Pear can think of no more critical angle on the gang of six "centrist" Senators now at the center of the health reform debate than the fattening snacks that fuel their deliberations.
It turns out that a majority of the gang of six--Senators
Baucus,
Snowe, Conrad, and Grassley--hail from states with
extraordinarily concentrated health insurance markets. As Catherine Arnst of
Businessweek reports, "such market concentration has become a potent argument for supporters of a public insurer," which would especially benefit consumers in those states. So guess what the Gang of Six has immediately taken off the table in reform talks?:
Already, the group of six has tossed aside the idea of a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers, which the president supports but Republicans said was a deal-breaker. Instead, they are proposing a network of
private, nonprofit cooperatives.
They've also dismissed an "income surtax on high earners"--because, hey, once you've already voted to
give away $250 billion to the very wealthy in estate tax cuts, how could you possibly ask mere millionaires to chip in for health care?
It's this kind of thinking that our press praises as "bipartisan"--just as it treats the
transparently value-laden estimates of CBO Budget Director Doug Elmendorf as
objective truth. Allergic to policy details, they entrench a regressive
incrementalism likely to accelerate the decline of an
already-broken health care marketplace.
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