Matthew Yglesias has made an important point about the strategy of the “progressive block” to attempt to block any form of health care reform which does not meet their ideological goals. This now includes blocking plans which might serve the goals of health care reform if they do not include a public option. An example of this was seen yesterday when they attacked an extremely sensible statement from Rahm Emanuel who argued that “The goal is non-negotiable; the path is.” I have used the Clinton’s as an example in criticizing the strategy of opposing any reform plan which the left does not consider to be perfect. Hillary convinced Bill to veto any bill which differed from the ideas of HillaryCare. As a result nothing was able to pass and the number of uninsured and under-insured has grown tremendously. Yglesias notes an even earlier parallel.
Yglesias points to a report on a plan proposed by Richard Nixon back in 1974 which is similar to what the Democrats are proposing today:
“It was an extremely extensive plan, as I remember, that would have given universal coverage” for health care, recalled Rudolph Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and economic official in the Ford administration.
Nixon introduced his Comprehensive Health Insurance Act on Feb. 6, 1974, days after he used what would be his final State of the Union address to call for universal access to health insurance.
“I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health-insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it, with vastly improved protection against catastrophic illnesses,” he told America.
Nixon said his plan would build on existing employer-sponsored insurance plans and would provide government subsidies to the self-employed and small businesses to ensure universal access to health insurance. He said it wouldn’t create a new federal bureaucracy.
The Nixon plan won support from a Time magazine editorial on Feb. 18, 1974, which noted that “more and more Americans have been insisting that national health insurance is an idea whose tune (sic) has come.”
Considering his support for HMO’s I would have reservations about a plan advocated by Richard Nixon without seeing further details, but it is remarkable that we are still struggling this many years later over a way to do what every other industrialized country manages to do and enable all citizens to have access to affordable health care. The plan was not killed by conservatives but by those on the left who hoped for something better:
Despite the heated politics of Watergate, national health-care legislation was proceeding in Congress thanks to a compromise brokered by a young Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy, a Nixon nemesis.
But then, according to a 1974 political almanac published by Congressional Quarterly, the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers lobbied successfully to kill the plan. Unions hoped to get a better deal after the next elections.
Yglesias concludes by saying essentially the same thing I have said on this topic in previous posts:
In retrospect, that particular iteration of the progressive block strategy doesn’t look so smart. And it’s possible that this time around, too, it’ll turn out that the votes aren’t there for a bill with a strong public option and the votes aren’t there for a bill without one either.
In retrospect, Emanuel was right and the liberal bloggers attacking him were wrong when Emanuel stated his concentration on the goals of health care reform as opposed to any specific path. For the past eight years we criticized George Bush and the Republicans for governing from the extreme right without compromise. Similar demands from the extreme left are no more rational.