Health Care in America: A History

Here is the intro from a very review of the recent history of health care by David Warsh in his Economic Principals web site:

State legislatures are indeed “laboratories of democracy,” as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously described them a century ago. But it is presidential candidacies that conduct the marketing campaigns for the social policies that governors and legislators devise.

To understand the extraordinary Republican bitterness attendant on Senate passage of the health care bill, it is necessary to remember that the strategy that at last delivered universal health insurance for the United States was devised in Massachusetts in late 2004 by Mitt Romney, a Republican governor in the early stages of seeking his party’s presidential nomination.

The Democrats, jiu-jitsu fashion, turned the initiative to their own advantage, having owned the issue since the Truman administration. In doing so, they achieved a goal that had eluded them for sixty years. The GOP’s conservative wing is correspondingly enraged. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans cast only a single vote (in the House) for a plan that their would-be standard-bearer devised. Internal storms now threaten to disable the party for many years to come.

Consider how a bipartisan approach devised by middle-of-the-road technocrats for an entrepreneurial Republican became a winning issue for the Democrats and provoked a crisis in the Republican Party.

David Warsh is well worth reading. What I like about this article is the richness of the history and the depth of insight it has on how health care arrived. It is far better than most mainstream articles. This shows you the loss to America as mainstream media has "downsized" and people like David Warsh now sit on the sidelines writing better stuff than the fishwrap peddled by the mainstream.

If you go on to read the whole Warsh article you can see how health care was a deeply bi-partisan issue. Sadly, the Republicans in the US Congress decided to say "nyet" and turn it into a one party policy. That is partisanship at its worst!