Scaling back

So a lot of folks are talking about breaking the health-insurance bills in half and passing them as parts, and now, with the death of Senator Kennedy, folks are discussing a scaled down bill and promoting a gradual move to universal coverage and cost-cutting.

Part of it is trust. Do you really trust that a scaled down bill will ever be 'scaled up'? Do you think that we'll ever gradually increase the coverage of the uninsured? Maybe some of this is about the victory of the Right in destroying our faith and trust in government, their reactionary extremism has polarized this nation and undermined even a base-level belief in the efficacy of government.

Part of it is that these reforms must happen together to create a winning coalition. The 'individual mandate' means a boon for insurance companies. To get progressives to agree to the mandate you have to truly reform the private sector insurance market. These must happen together. They must also include an employer mandate to keep employers from dropping millions of employees into the private insurance market, and to pay for the increased cost in covering everyone. These reforms are tied up together to create a reform package that actually accomplishes reform.