Those of us who live comfortably in wonkworld are defensively dismissive of simple answers. The idea of framing a policy on a bumper sticker is repugnant to us. But often we err in the opposite direction, risking the health of the forest while we worry about the average number of leaves per tree.
This tendency is growing during the healthcare reform debate where an increasing amount of firepower is directed at a question that will have little direct impact on how quickly the number of uninsured Americans is reduced, which I construe as the shared goal here.
Instead we're diverted by the little debate parsing the motivation and precise meaning of providers who made a commitment to constrain costs and a big debate about whether there should be a public plan available to the insured, which may become another binary contest that simultaneously provides ample fodder for cable hosts and bloggers while impeding real progress.
Underlying these questions is the hint that there are some Bad People involved in this discussion whose views are beyond the pale and are thus unworthy of serious discussion. Some see them as insurance capitalistic insurance companies who seek profits. Others fear socialists who want to push us toward a government-run system.
One of the lessons President Obama has apparently learned from the Clinton debacle is the importance of delegating the details to legislators. More of us should follow his leadership. I'm for a program that most quickly expands coverage at an acceptable cost. While I have some hypotheses (and no one has anything that's more than a hypothesis here) about how this could best be achieved, they are secondary to progress toward the larger goal.
We have a chronic problem here in Washington where analysts define and expand a problem until it is too big to comprehend and too complex to resolve. That's a good strategy for those who have a long-term investment in problems - an apparently growing segment of our political system - but a bad one for those seeking solutions.
A growing number of commentators seem to be taking their eye off the ball here and transmuting the debate into a comfortable ritual of settling old scores.
My guess is that the uninsured find this focus less than compelling, but can't do a whole lot about it because they are marginalized. If they had the power to influence the debate, they'd likely be insured by now.
Instead they're ill represented by a chorus of surrogates, all of whom have other fish to fry and seem more interested in their parochial issues than in making a serious attack on the big issues - cost and coverage.