A number of liberal commentators have taken a recent column of mine to be blaming Obama for failing to work with Republicans to fix or at least improve Obamacare. They retort that Republicans aren’t interested in compromising with Obama on health care. Republicans haven’t proposed any improvements to Obamacare. Brian Beutler lays out this case.
They’re reading me wrong. My actual argument has two parts. First, liberals and conservatives have different views of what health insurance should do that are hard to reconcile. (See this follow-up to the column for more on this.) Second, Obama pretends that these differences do not exist in order to portray Republican opposition to his policies are unreasonable. So, for example, he suggests that conservatives should be pleased that Obamacare allows states to opt out of the law in favor of their own policies. But those state waivers apply only to policies that reflect liberal assumptions about health insurance.
My argument, in other words, isn’t that Obama has failed to find common ground. I’m not sure there’s much common ground to be found.
If you want our health-insurance system to rely much less heavily on federal regulation, very few of the “fixes” for Obamacare that liberals are suggesting are going to have any appeal—leaving aside any partisan desires to stick the Democrats with the flaws of Obamacare. So let’s stop pretending, as Obama does, that it’s only crazed partisanship that is stopping Republicans from working with him on those fixes.
My column closes with Obama’s analogy of Obamacare to a “starter home.” He says that people buy them expecting to make improvements. I note that sometimes people decide these homes aren’t working out for them and try to move somewhere else.
In case anyone still doesn’t get the point of that analogy, I’m not suggesting that Republicans improve Obamacare. I’m suggesting that they replace it.