TW: The opponents of health care reform have very effectively used the messiness of the process to bolster their opposition. No alternatives presented merely use picking away at the ugly process in order to derail reform. Another approach is particularly insidious, the piecemeal BS as in "we will use the 'free-market' bits without the big government bits'. I have tried to explain moral hazard, adverse selection etc. This stuff all fits together or it does not fit at all.
One of the drawbacks is its yearning for simplicity powered by emotion. A perfect opportunity for an opposing party to demagogue its way back to power by manipulating the emotions.
From Economist:
"TWO sausage metaphors spring to mind when thinking about the health-care bill and its future. First was the familiar "legislative sausage machine" that stuffed the casing with such wonders as the Cornhusker giveaway, the union bribe and so forth. The second, now, would be "salami tactics", also known as "pass the popular bits": the idea that thin slices of the bill could be sent through Congress, to see what makes it through.
The problem, says Richard Kirsch of Health Care for America Now, is that
'The public wants to stop insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. You can't do that without a mandate; you can't do a mandate without subsidizing coverage; you can't subsidize coverage without Medicare savings and new revenues. The public wants to end medical bankruptcies—but to do that you need to provide affordable coverage to people and you need to mandate decent insurance benefits and put a ban on annual and lifetime caps. Doing all that requires setting up exchanges and subsidizing coverage.'
Put another way, the whole of the bill is a lot more than the sum of its parts; the unhealthy, fattening parts might make it through but not the lean meat. This strategy combines the worst of political timidity and policy failure, and the Democrats don't want to be known as the sausage party."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/01/nickname_you_dont_want
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