Lieberman vs. health care reform

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I wonder what Joe Lieberman is really doing here.  If I were Harry Reid I’d be pretty upset. It wouldn’t be long before Lieberman was stripped of every position of power he now has in the Senate.

The strangest thing about Lieberman’s opposition to reform is that it doesn’t fit his politics at all.  For all his hawkishness, Lieberman was always fairly liberal on domestic issues.  He supported healthcare reform as a running mate to Al Gore, which included measures similar to those now being proposed.  As Ezra Klein notes, “At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals.”

That’s a pretty lame reason to do (or not do) anything, let alone oppose important – albeit flawed – reform.  Lieberman could be working to make the bill better, but he didn’t even bother attending the compromise meetings which led to the Medicare buy-in plan.  This strikes me as immature and rather petty.  It wasn’t exactly the Democrats’ fault that he jumped ship to back his pal McCain in 2008, which seems to be at the root of all this animosity.  I share Russel Arben Fox’s frustration at this point, if not because I’m a huge fan of this bill, but simply because I’d like its opponents to ground their opposition in, at the very least, principled, ideological differences rather than this sort of childishness.

Actually, the Medicare buy-in was one of the better ideas I’d seen come out of the reform debate lately.  But then, I’m drifting more and more toward advocating single-payer these days, so expanding Medicare makes sense to me.  Too many programs with too many problems associated with each one seems dangerous.  One single program which the federal government can reform down the road makes more fiscal sense.

In many ways I think a single-payer option makes more sense for conservatives as well as liberals.  I know, that’s crazy-talk, but I think it makes sense.  With healthcare out of the picture, conservatives can focus on many other more important matters.  At the end of the day, people need health insurance and the people who need it most are the least likely to have it.  It’s time to do something about that and single payer may be the most equitible, and in the end the most cost-effective, that our government can come up with.  It can be means-tested, or vouchers-based, or any number of things to make it more fiscally sound, but it’s time to get the program in place.  Tthe government already spends nearly as much as the private market on healthcare.  That’s bound to go up no matter what we do.  Businesses and citizens alike are buckling under the strain of a very messy, incoherent system.  We need to make the system coherent.  We need a single operating system rather than all these different, often conflicting (rarely competing) systems.

But that’s not going to happen so we’re left with what we’ve got, and for now, it looks like Joe Lieberman is hell-bent on killing even this reform. The likelihood that this bill gets pushed toward the reconciliation process is higher than ever, and the swiss-cheese bill we see after that is anyone’s guess.