Prologue

Although the administration and Congressional Dems thought the were trying a different approach from 1994 (Republicans were very much aware of repeating their own performance), health care reform in 2010 looks very much the way it did 16 years ago. Ask someone who was there: Brad DeLong (hoisted from his archives):

I had been avoiding reading The System--Washington reporters Haynes Johnson and David Broder's account of the catastrophic collapse of the Clinton Administration health care reform effort--for a number of years. The worst hours of my life in 1993-1994 were those I spent providing analytical support for health care reform. I watched the catastrophe approach and then saw the crash, the product of a three-fold bankruptcy: moral, intellectual, and political.

The moral bankruptcy was on the part of the Republican Party's power structure, which thought (correctly) that placing the government into total gridlock was a road to political success, and cared not at all for making public policy better along any dimension.

The intellectual bankruptcy was on the part of President Clinton and the senior White House domestic policy staff, which never solved the puzzle of how to construct and sell a plan to make the American health care system better, and which was totally clueless with respect to how to construct a coalition to support reform.

The political bankruptcy was on the part of the Democratic congressional majorities in House and Senate, which ultimately failed to pass even a ghost of a bill to reform America's health care system along any dimension. The combination of these three bankruptcies has left America in 2000 with a health-care system even more wasteful and inefficient and even worse at delivering health care to the poor than we had a decade ago.

You, Dear Reader, already know this. What makes this all the more depressing is that, unlike 1994, Democratic congressional majorities in the House and Senate did in fact pass bills in their respective chambers. And yet, cannot get even this "ghost of a bill" across the finish line.

Pass the fucking bill.