https://www.vox.com/2018/8/3/17641560/medicare-for-all-trump
A market-based solution can’t work if Republicans won’t let it.
But it’s also thanks to the Trump administration, which, having failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, has undertaken a nearly unprecedented campaign of regulatory malfeasance that aims to prevent it from functioning and minimize the number of people on whom it bestows comprehensive health coverage.
Republicans are, of course, entitled to act like this if they want to. But their determination carries a powerful lesson for Democrats. If they believe that universal health insurance is a moral imperative — as they have since at least Franklin Roosevelt’s time — then only a very heavy-handed government program is going to get the job done.
There are lots of alternatives based on subsidies and regulations that work in principle and are used in practice in many European countries. But in a democracy, a workable regulatory system needs to be able to survive the regular alternation of parties in power. The lesson of the Trump era is that the Obamacare approach can’t do that. It’ll take a big, dumb program that just keeps trundling along unless Congress actually repeals it — like how Social Security checks keep going out no matter who’s president.
A market-based solution can’t work if Republicans won’t let it.
But it’s also thanks to the Trump administration, which, having failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, has undertaken a nearly unprecedented campaign of regulatory malfeasance that aims to prevent it from functioning and minimize the number of people on whom it bestows comprehensive health coverage.
Republicans are, of course, entitled to act like this if they want to. But their determination carries a powerful lesson for Democrats. If they believe that universal health insurance is a moral imperative — as they have since at least Franklin Roosevelt’s time — then only a very heavy-handed government program is going to get the job done.
There are lots of alternatives based on subsidies and regulations that work in principle and are used in practice in many European countries. But in a democracy, a workable regulatory system needs to be able to survive the regular alternation of parties in power. The lesson of the Trump era is that the Obamacare approach can’t do that. It’ll take a big, dumb program that just keeps trundling along unless Congress actually repeals it — like how Social Security checks keep going out no matter who’s president.
