“No, no, I mean He Should Have Passed A Bipartisan Affordable Care Act.”
By Ron Fournier makes himself look ridiculous. Because a man in Ron Fournier’s position can apparently afford to be made to look ridiculous:
On health care, we needed a market-driven plan that decreases the percentage of uninsured Americans without convoluting the U.S. health care system. Just such a plan sprang out of conservative think tanks and was tested by a GOP governor in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney.
Instead of a bipartisan agreement to bring that plan to scale, we got more partisan warfare. The GOP resisted, Obama surrendered his mantle of bipartisanship, and Democrats muscled through a one-sided law that has never been popular with a majority of the public.
Even leaving aside the “conservative think tanks” issue (please!), what aspect of Travaglinicare did Fournier see missing in the ACA? Was it that the ACA “convoluted” the American health care system because it expanded Medicaid? Well, it’s hard to know because this is a word that does not mean anything in this context. But it would be a strange argument, given that Travaglinicare provided free insurance to a greater percentage of the population than the Medicaid expansion did.
What the argument this, then — see also Krugman on this point — is that Obama should have passed the ACA, but in a way that was…bipartisan. The fact that Republicans had an explicit strategy of not voting for anything that would give Obama a major policy achievement, and hence requiring bipartisanship would mean that the United States would not get the health care reform that Fournier concedes the country needs, it to Fournier beside the point. Anachronistically identifying the Massachusetts health care reform exclusively with Mitt Romney helps to make this sound a little less ridiculous — he was the Republican candidate for president! He supported something like the ACA! — but when you bring the massive supermajorities of Democrats in the Massachusetts legislature back into the picture, the fact that Romney signed the bill the legislature put on his desk (after some overridden vetoes) makes the ridiculousness comes back into focus. The Massachusetts health care reform tells us less than nothing about what congressional Republicans could support.
But when you believe that whether a law is “bipartisan” is more important than its content, and believe that bipartisanship is something the president can conjure out of thin air, you’re going to push Both-Sides-Do-Itism to a point at which the word “parody” seems grossly inadequate again and again.