Liberal Discontent
January 21, 2010 2 Comments
There is a good conversation going on over at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen regarding problems with healthcare reform and how Democrats could have handled things differently. Commenter Kyle of Vogue Republic made this excellent point:
No the argument I’m making is 20% of something is better than 0% of something and if you care about helping people, aiming for 90% of what you want and getting 0% helps fewer people than aiming for 50% of what you want and getting 20 or 30 percent, given the realities of legislation.
My response:
An old Jonah Goldberg quote is that liberals will always pass a good solution looking for a great one. They have no belief in incremental progress.
This is the real meat of the differences between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives are accused of resisting change. This is false. As Disraeli said, “Change is inevitable”. The debate is over the scope and pace of change. Obviously the Right likes change to be slow and small in size. The Left likes big, big change and the faster the better. This leads to a bit of foolhardiness in my humble opinion. On healthcare it meant passing up real solutions that might have actually gotten bipartisan support in favor of big, bold splashes that sounded great in campaign commercials but had a snowball’s chance of making it to the President’s desk.
The story that will be told to voters in the fall is that Democrats wanted to do Great-and-Wonderful Things for healthcare and those mean old Republicans stopped it. The truth is that Democrats wanted greatness and it might be fair to ask them why they weren’t willing to settle for good.
Mike, how are we to get intelligent conservative points like this into Alexandria if intelligent conservatives like you don’t join us as Authors there to make them?
See your About page for a concise invitation, drop us a line for the complete one.
Mike,
I’ll answer your question. As many liberals see it, myself included, the small incremental changes that you laud in the Senate bill are not changes at all. Lacking a public option, the Senate bill still keeps the power of healthcare delivery entirely in the hands of private insurance companies. And lets be clear – insurnace companies are in business to first make profits for their shareholders and second deliver healthcare to policy holders. While the insurance companies have been required to expand their coverage pool by a a small but still significant number of people, because they are private companies, they will still argue that in doing so they need to maintain their profit margins, which can only be done by cutting services or raising rates.
Neither is acceptable to liberals, because we view healthcare as a necessary service, not a discretionary good. Thus, any plan that doesn’t include things making the delivery of that service affordable and universal doesn’t meet our test of good legislation, nor does it show any real change from the present system as we see it.
I would also add, from inside the federal bureaucracy, that small incremental change doesn’t generally happen – the bureaucracy waits it to death. Big change – as intellectually challenging as it may be for some Conservatives – is the only way the goal posts will move.