Where has this guy been?

More juice from Paul Ryan

Basically, what the health care debate boils down to is that we have been telling the American voting public that they will be able to
1) extend coverage to millions of people
2) keep the same quality of coverage and care, or improve it if you had a pre-existing condition
3) save money
4) not raise taxes

This of course, is all rather nice sounding. It's pretty much what BOTH parties have suggested is their "plan" to fix health care. But it's not actually what a health care "reform" would be. What you'd need to tell people in that case looks more like this
1) more people need to be covered. That will cost money, either as taxpayers or consumers of insurance
2) more costs need to be shared by consumers to lower their demand for care
3) your employer benefits will need to go away. That will mean that your health care plan as you know of it is probably going away too

Those are harder questions and things for people to swallow. Those three things are basically true whether you move to a single-payer British-style system or to a Singapore/Wyden-Bennett style system, the only differences are the mechanisms involved (price controls versus price transparency for example).

But this guy gets that. He doesn't seem too interested in selling a bill of goods that cannot exist or in having half measures. The real reason, the important reason, for the public to reform health care is not to extend more equal access to the sick, the old, and the poor. Those things can be done rather easily as a matter of looking at the bigger picture. But even though they are important things morally speaking to a lot of people, I don't think they're central to the problem. The problem is the long-term growth of costs throughout the health care system (insurance and cost of care). And it's because the measures we have used which intend to do those other nobler things are raising our long-term costs to the point that it will bankrupt our ability to do anything else in the same way that it already does for individuals with insufficient health insurance already. You have to attack the long-term growth of costs. The current bill has plantings of things that do this, and there are a bunch of different ways to try it. But it's not serious enough about it. Sort of like Waxman-Markey and climate change. If you are a big Al Gore fan, that bill royally and utterly failed to make a dent in the problem. Same thing here. This does some nice things. Some of them are important. But they're not fixing the problem, they're treating the symptoms of the disease instead of attempting to cure it.

Still when somebody in there sits down and says exactly what's wrong with the system, and then sits down and says in response to "....I’m a big Wyden-Bennett guy, frankly." with something like this:

"I have a lot of respect for that plan. If I were a Democrat, it’s the bill I’d be on. He’s got more mandates than I’d like. But if Ron Wyden and I were in a room, we could hammer out a deal by tomorrow."

- this would be an attitude I would like to see more of. It's refreshing, even if it's dishonest. John Boehner and his orange spray tan needs to be fired and replaced with this guy tomorrow. Because a serious message needs to be sent about the "politics of failure" and the ideas need to be tough minded and clearly defined. These nebulous platitudes promising us the moon and our security and so on are probably what people want to hear, or what politicians think they want to hear. But they are not solutions. And they're no different from what we hear from either side of the aisle. An opposition party needs to have ideas. It can't just sit around and reject the other guy's. There's still some stuff in there that sounds suspicious talking-point-esque. But it also sounds like he has some serious interest in tackling problems. I'm curious as to how some of these guys stay in politics personally. Ron Paul, Pete Stark, Paul Ryan, Ron Wyden, and Russ Feingold, all sort of have these pet political causes and attack them with gusto. I don't understand how they're not cynically destroyed yet.