RNC Chairman Michael Steele talked to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review [via Michael Cannon of Cato] about Obama’s health-industry proposals, and this is what the paper reported:
Having Congress reshape health care puts “the wrong people at the table,” Steele said. He said stake holders — “doctors, lawyers, health care employees, insurance companies” — should develop a solution and present it to Congress, rather than the other way around.
First, this ignores the fact that the insurance companies and health-care employees are “at the table.”
Second, it displays the misguided and counterproductive fealty to Big Business that has wounded the GOP and the conservative movement.
For a winning message, and to reverse the erosion of the party’s principles, it really might be time for the GOP’s leadership to start challenging and critiquing Big Business more, in the contexts of defending the market and advancing the interests of regular people.
Cannon’s Cato post also reminds me that I need to backtrack on a critique I made of a New Republic article by Jonathan Chait. Chait was right, I now realize, that Republicans sometimes confuse pro-freedom with pro-big business, or, as he put it;
Conservatives certainly have understandable ideological reasons to oppose the Obama health care reform as a whole. It’s the particulars of their opposition that arouse curiosity. The right has presented its opposition to health care reform as principled disagreement with “big government.” But opposing “big government” can mean different things. Does it mean opposition to regulation? To spending? To the direct funding of public services as opposed to via private sector middlemen? The Republican Party and its ideological allies have defined it increasingly as whatever suits the profitability of the health care industry.
However much Democratic policy may favor the health care industry, Steele’s comments make me realize Chait had a strong point.
