Ezra Klein has a smart article on the troubling news that advocates of national health care have a much better sense of how to enact their desire if they win the White House. Next time, they won’t try to cut congressional committees out of the action. They understand now that most people are happy with their own health-care arrangements and don’t want to see Washington disrupt them. It is harder to argue that Hillary Clinton’s current plan, for example, threatens what people value about their own health care than it was to make that argument about her 1993-94 plan. (It’s not, however, impossible.)

One thing that I think Klein doesn’t quite address is just how secure the Democrats thought their congressional majority was at the time. It’s one reason that they lacked internal discipline, with some committee chairmen willing to attack the Clinton plan from the left and others from the right. Presumably Republicans won’t have the advantage of quite so much Democratic complacency next time.

Even so, Democrats may overreach. The public is more unhappy with the current health-care system than it is clamoring for universal coverage, and I’m not sure most advocates of national health care appreciate the point. (See Michael Cannon’s post, and questions 6 and 9 from the poll to which he links, for a sense of how opponents of liberal health-care policy could get a foothold in public opinion.)