From Arnold Kling's askblog:
The Left’s Post-Election Self-Examination?
Brad DeLong writes,
Until the election, this sort of question had only been asked by conservative economists.
Perhaps this is an early example of the pattern of self-examination that I thought might take place after the election. When it comes to their policy portfolios, the Republicans will be second-guessing themselves in terms of political positioning. Meanwhile, the Democrats may be second-guessing themselves in terms of feasibility.
Massachusetts has been walking down this exchange-and-public-program-expansion road for six years now, since Mitt Romney signed RomneyCare. Massachusetts has been vacuuming up doctors and nurses from Costa Rica and elsewhere and still has been finding that the cost of treating your state population is higher when 97% are insured than it was when 88% were insured. And there aren’t enough loose doctors and nurses in the rest of the world for the ACA to vacuum up enough of them to meet the needs of not 1 state but 50 states.
…What is your guess as to what will happen if the ACA works for access, works for quality, works for coverage–but the extra health-care workforce needed isn’t there, and the lines start to get longer?Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Until the election, this sort of question had only been asked by conservative economists.
Perhaps this is an early example of the pattern of self-examination that I thought might take place after the election. When it comes to their policy portfolios, the Republicans will be second-guessing themselves in terms of political positioning. Meanwhile, the Democrats may be second-guessing themselves in terms of feasibility.
My guess is that both parties will be second-guessing both issues. dm
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