John Cassidy Explains That Those Parts of ObamaCare That Are “Liberal” Are Working Very Well

The sect of “neoliberalism” I belonged to (or thought I belonged to) believed not that wherever possible the private sector should be left to deliver goods and services, but rather that it often made sense for the government to incentivize the private sector to deliver the right goods and services to the right people and then stand back and let it do so. It often makes sense. But it often doesn’t: consider war, education, pensions, health insurance, research and development, and the spread of knowledge and information more generally.

But perhaps the lesson is that even though “neoliberalism” a la Charlie Peters and the Washington Monthly has an honorable history, it is time to let the term simply stand for BAD THINGS and thus send it off to the intellectual glue factory…

Other than that quibble, a nice piece by John Cassidy:

John Cassidy: Liberalism Will Survive Obamacare:

Obamacare, lest we forget, isn’t a particularly liberal reform; it originated as a right-wing counter-proposal to Hillarycare. How, then, can it be a test of liberalism?… Under the ambit of the A.C.A., more than a dozen states have launched Web sites that appear to be working reasonably well…. But the basic point is inarguable: in rolling out the A.C.A., the White House has screwed up very badly. If the political gods had empowered the ghost of Lee Atwater to undermine President Obama’s second term… it is unlikely that the godfather of negative campaigning could have come up with something as fiendish as this….

Until pretty recently, the liberal position on health-care reform was closely identified with support for the public option…. The idea of leaving the private insurance system as it is and expanding coverage by making its purchase mandatory emerged from the Heritage Foundation in the early nineteen-nineties. Even after Mitt Romney successfully introduced a version of this policy proposal in Massachusetts, most liberals regarded it as inadequate, or as a sop to the big insurers. But in early 2009, the Obama White House overruled liberal opposition…. What turned Obamacare into rallying cry for liberals was… that Republicans opposed the A.C.A. with such venom and vigor….

Strictly speaking, however, Obamacare isn’t a test of liberalism; it’s a test of technocratic centrism of the sort advocated by Romney and, eventually, endorsed by Obama… neoliberalism… wherever possible, the private sector should be left to deliver goods and services. In both Romneycare and the A.C.A., the designers of the system went to great lengths to make sure this would happen….

The great irony of Obama’s reforms is that the most “socialized” bits of them—the expansion of Medicaid and new regulations that prevent insurers from discriminating against the sick, the old, and the female—are working out pretty well. Where the Administration has gotten into trouble is in trying to promote private enterprise. Even in the best scenarios, improving the workings of the individual insurance market was going to be a formidable challenge. When Republican governors and state legislators all across the country refused to set up their own exchanges, or expand Medicaid, it turned into a logistical nightmare…. But to call this a failure of liberalism is to bludgeon the English language. It’s a failure—or, rather, a botched launch—of a well-meaning effort to find the middle ground….

And what about the liberals—the ones who pushed the White House to pursue something more radical than a souped-up version of Romneycare? Even if the A.C.A. were to collapse before it got going—and as I’ve said several times, I don’t expect this will happen—they wouldn’t be routed; they would be vindicated. Far from slinking away and conceding that their grand plans had failed, they would once again take up the campaign, which has been active in various forms since the nineteen-sixties, for the public option, and perhaps even a single-payer system…