Most hardcore liberals I have read and spoken to want a single-payer health plan. The most active liberal bloggers on this issue, however, repeat the mantra of not making the perfect the enemy of the good, and they seem ready to support almost whatever health-care “reform” comes out of Congress — just as Obama is likely to sign whatever mangled beast Congress produces.
My favorite example of this comes in a blog post today from Matt Yglesias, who works for the 501(c)4 arm of the White House, known as the Center for American Progress. In this post, he manages to blame conservatives for Democrats’ embrace of crappy policy, and also mention, for the second time this week, that he went to Harvard:
On the merits, I’m not a huge fan of the employer mandate concept in general. Unfortunately, conservative economists and conservative politicians have been extremely effective at making the American political system extraordinarily tax averse. This has created huge incentives to finance things through de facto taxes rather than de jure ones (which is what’s happening here) or through tax expenditures rather than actual expenditures. The aggregate impact of this on American public policy has been quite bad, and its pernicious effects continue to be felt as we watch the health care and cap and trade debate unfold.
In short: We would rather straight-up raise taxes on people, but people don’t like tax hikes, so we are raising taxes through the back door.
