The Health Care Consensus

I'd venture to guess that 80-90% of Americans agree with the following statements:

1. If you lose your job you should be able to purchase health insurance without consideration of pre-existing conditions.

2. Your health insurance should not be taken away from you because you are sick.

3. Americans should feel secure about being able to afford health insurance over their entire life. The Medicare consensus derives from this statement.

This list could go on, and probably includes the idea that some reform is needed to take care of these issues. I am not claiming that there is any consensus about how to address these issues.

So why aren't we arguing (even passionately arguing) about how to solve these problems? Instead, we're being sidetracked by bogus arguments which seem only to be aimed at illogically aligning the healthcare debate with America's neverending culture wars. The only conclusion I can reach is that the powerful health insurance industry knows that if we seriously address these consensus issues, the logical solutions will be intolerable to them

In the 80's I used to tell my liberal friends (I considered myself liberal as well) that sometimes the Reaganites were pointing out real problems (e.g. the culture of welfare, absurd regulations), and that if we didn't come up with liberal solutions to these problems, they were going to be solved for us in a way that we wouldn't like. Conservatives be warned. If you're not part of the solution, these problems will be solved for you. And you're not going to like it.