Positive or Negative

Health reform is the big news, and I need to separate various trains of thoughts into separate posts.

One question I am dealing with is whether to feel positive or negative about the reform efforts. I have posted twice with some gloom. There is after all the sense of tax the man behind the tree. There are others who really support this by limiting itemized deductions. However, having a phase-out of deductions to finance health care reform makes the code actually more complicated. Instead, just get rid of a few (of course to really make it pay you would probably need to get rid of some of the popular ones, like mortgage interest).

Overall, a lot of the people have doom and gloom predictions. Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic's Blog links to both Ezra Klein and Karen Tummulty on this matter. They all have this sense of this revenue raising problem. The Yglesias post is what I am responding to above, in an oblique way.

However, over at the New America Foundation, there are still signs of hope. Perhaps it is because they are centrists. The point out though that the initial CBO score was scary, but that things got much better in that regard. They show the concessions gained from the industry, which in some sense is starting to realize that everything is unsustainable. But, if things really do not work out this time, with all of the industry behind it, with people sort of annoyed, etc. then I do not think we will ever see it work until we really do hit a crisis.

So where do I stand? Well, I think we need to make hard choices, and I do not think anyone is helping with the rhetoric. First, taxes are going to increase, even without health reform. We have to do it, because it is unsustainable now. We are thus going to have to raise it even further if we institute major health reform. But, we need to link it to a larger notion of sacrifice. What do we believe as a people and as a nation? What do we want as a goal?

I often talk to law friends about what is the most important aspect of law or policy. Many talk about defense, others talk about contracts. I always come back to taxes and budgets. No matter what we do, they reflect our priorities. And I just worry that on this issue, our lack of willingness to sacrifice to start on the road to something better may kill everything.