What’s Paul Krugman’s advice to liberals like MoveOn and Howard Dean upset over current health care negotiations in the Senate? Pass the Bill.
It seems that liberals like Krugman want a bill just for the sake of passing a bill. Politics and not principle appear to be his main motivation, which is strange coming from an economist and college professor.
Ideological purists like Howard Dean and MoveOn object to Harry Reid’s version of reform. But why? The current Senate bill supposedly lacks the government-run public option that liberals have been salivating over for the past year. What remains from Senate negotiations is a hodgepodge of mandates, new regulations and higher taxes.
The one issue both sides of the aisle should agree on during the holidays is that the current health care bill is awful; it’s really really bad.
Conservatives and libertarians should hate the bill because it contains hundreds of billions in new taxes, an unconstitutional mandate for individual health insurance, an expensive employer mandate, costs over $2 trillion and it does nothing to bend the health care cost curve downward, among many other reasons.
Liberals should hate the bill because it (supposedly) contains no government-run public option, politically connected health care companies practically drafted the legislation, PhARMA supports it, socialist Senator Bernie Sanders doesn’t, it fails to cover 100% of the uninsured and it doesn’t bend the health care cost curve downward.
Dr. Krugman may attempt to use his perch at the New York Times to rally progressives toward a final health care push, but the ugly truth is that health care reform has become the product of Washington, D.C. politics. That’s never a good thing. President Obama rallied against Washington-style politics during his campaign but it appears that his bill and his political strategy have embraced the zero sum ultra-partisan approach that he derided so frequently in the past.
Dr. Krugman’s headline should have been “Kill this Bill.”
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