This is big. Gallup is reporting that 50% of Americans believe that it is not government’s responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health care coverage, while only 47% believe that is government’s responsibility. That may sound like a pretty evenhanded result. But it’s a huge change from 2007, when 69% believed it is government’s responsibility to provide health care coverage and only 28% disagreed.
A number of liberal political scientists like James Fishkin of the University of Texas have been promoting what they call deliberative democracy. The idea is to provide panels of citizens who are provided with information about public policy and are asked to discuss it and try to reach conclusions. I have long thought that such experiments tend to be tilted toward attractively packaged big government policies, or at least that there is a danger they will be.
But maybe I was wrong. What we have had over the past year looks like an exercise in deliberative democracy on the issue of health care. The question of whether we should have government-directed health insurance has been debated and discussed as it has not been since 1994. The Internet, which was not a factor then, has enabled citizens to connect and communicate as they could not then. In the process millions of Americans seem to have moved away from the view that providing health insurance is a government responsibility, a view they held when the issue was not as thoroughly debated and when the chances of government-directed insurance becoming reality was minimal. They’ve decided in effect that they prefer something like the status quo, even though it may not be ideal, to what the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders are trying to force on them. The prospect of hanging concentrates the mind, as Samuel Johnson said. The prospect that government-directed health insurance might become a reality has moved millions of Americans to decide it’s not a good idea.
