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.
