Single-Payer: Dead In Vermont, Dead Everywhere

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Dec 26, 2014

 

Will the death of single-payer in Vermont have important national consequences? In Vox, Sarah Kliff has a retrospective on how it happened, and she seems to think it will:

 

(Snip)

 

In other words, Vermont’s failure to enact single-payer may be one of the most important policy flops in recent memory. Health care in America remains a problem unsolved. After the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the argument over health care was channeled into a debate about the specifics of the ACA and its political future. But as the intensity of that debate has eased, with the law having done nothing extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad and the GOP now looking to marginal reforms instead of full repeal, the conversation has expanded again to include the dysfunction of our medical system in general and not just the ACA’s failures to address it.

 

If single-payer had pushed forward in Vermont just as pundits and policy makers cooled on the ACA debate, it would have dominated the new conversation. The pivot from the ACA to a single-payer system has long been favored by liberal health care wonks, and a real live state-level example of that happening would add huge momentum to it. Single-payer, which so far has seemed a political impossibility in America, would suddenly be a possibility. But the failure in Vermont means that, for now at least, the single-payer pivot has become far less viable, leaving the field more open for other approaches.

 

(Snip)

 

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