From today’s MTP, John Meacham of Newsweek said the following:
My sense is that if you ask a lot of even very well-informed people what’s in this plan, I’m not sure a lot of people could really explain it. And I think that it’s an unusual failure on the president’s part to execute a kind of public education. I don’t think he’s made the case for this.
I have felt the same thing for some time. Apart from the idea that it is “reform” I don’t think that the White House has done an especially good job communicating what the exact fix is supposed to be, save that it will increase insurance coverage. The reliance o(wn the legislative process to produce a plan hasn’t been too smart because the very nature of that process means there is no way to know what one is going to have until the end of the process. As a result the debate is about a combination of things on paper now that will never make it through the process alongside speculation about will eventually be in the plan. This strikes me as politically problematic.
Granted, even with a more direct proposal from the executive branch, the above problems would be present. Still, it seems that the current strategy (which was an attempt, I think, to avoid the errors of the Clinton health care reform attempt) has exacerbated these problems but not having some foundational ideas that could be used to both build the legislation but also the public relations side of the game.
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August 9th, 2024 at 7:14 pm
The “communicating” problem that you (and The Economist*) note is actually an institutional problem.
In their own ways, both Clinton in 1993 and Obama now have come up against it. And I really believe it is insoluble–without fundamental reform–institutional reform, that is.
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* and I suppose many others, but those are about all I read on US politics!
August 9th, 2024 at 7:51 pm
I was thinking earlier about how different this all would be different under a parliamentary system, and hence your point.
August 11th, 2024 at 9:05 am
[...] I will stipulate that the numbers for health care reform that I have seen are certainly problematic for Obama and the Democrats to this point (and at least in part for reasons I noted on Sunday). [...]