Universal Health Care

James Pethokoukis, quoting Ramesh Ponnuru:

Obama’s health-care plan is designed to evolve into a national health-insurance program along the lines of Canada’s. The resulting government monopoly or near-monopoly on health insurance would stifle innovation, require bureaucratic rationing, and infringe on freedom. But it would also move American politics permanently leftward ... the inevitable disappointments and failures of a nationalized system would just as inevitably be blamed on underfunding, creating a bidding war that liberals would usually win ... the creation of a new system would make free-market alternatives look more radical to the public than they do now, because they would be more radical. The public’s aversion to risk, which now hurts advocates of liberal policies as much as it helps them, would only help them. So national health insurance could be a lasting political success for liberals even if it is a colossal policy failure; it could, indeed, succeed politically because of its failures.

Guess what part of this really bothers Ponnuru.

It would probably have more impact if Ponnuru weren't known to have nothing in the way of insight whatsoever.

Dday had a post a day or two ago that's relevant here, quoting hilzoy:

Pethokoukis and Cannon claim that if Obama succeeds in passing health care, then people who might have been conservatives will like it, and will be more likely to vote for the people who passed it. This is unexceptional. An honest conservative might accept this claim and say: well, I guess our ideas are unpopular, so we'll just have to make our case more persuasively.

But that's not the conclusion they draw. Pethokoukis and Cannon say: because people will like health care reform, if we do not block it, our party will lose support. So precisely because people would like it if they tried it, we need to make sure that it fails.

To which dday adds:

They have to block health care reform because people will like it. And if government produces, the entire GOP worldview is lost. Bill Kristol said this a long time ago.

And so they're all falling into line to block any attempt to provide healthcare for everyone in the country because people will favor it. What both hilzoy and dday leave out is that the Democrats are witless enough to think that they should just take the blame that the Republicans are going to heap on them for failure.

I hope to hell I'm wrong on this, but I'm not holding my breath for the Democrats to finally develop some smarts.