James Surowiecki ably describes the gulf between Democrats and Republicans on expanding access to health care. Democrats see the fact that 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance as a problem that the federal government should solve in the near term, and Republicans don’t. Democrats also see the fact that for certain groups of people, it’s impossible to get affordable health insurance at all as an individual as a problem, and the Republicans don’t. Or at least they don’t see either of those problems as being worth doing what it takes to solve them.
But there’s another side of the issue that he completely ignores — the fact that health care costs are rising rapidly and that both Medicare and employer-funded health insurance are headed for disaster. Most retiree health plans are already in deep trouble, and the second order effects are severe. One of the reasons General Motors has been uncompetitive is that a substantial portion of the revenue they earn from each car they make goes to pay for health insurance for retired autoworkers. Republicans do not seem to want to engage on this issue, even if America’s system were perfect today, the rising costs insure that it’s going to have big problems down the road.
And this, to me, is the bigger problem. Republicans and Democrats can debate until the end of the world whether the government should make sure everyone has health insurance. I am strongly in favor of universal health care, personally. But regardless of where people stand on that issue, our government is going to have to engage with the issue of rising health care costs and growing Medicare enrollment sometime soon. The fact that Republicans are unwilling to treat the problem as the impending crisis that it is disqualifies them from being taken seriously as far as I’m concerned.
The Atlantic doesn’t get blogging
I’ve always been impressed with the stable of bloggers The Atlantic has amassed. There are some who I actively avoid, but it’s an impressive group overall. The latest redesign shows that whoever was in charge really doesn’t understand what’s good about a good blog. Take a look at this post from Ta-Nehisi Coates explaining to readers just what happened. Coates used to have a blog that had his posts listed in reverse chronological order, just like this one. Now he’s got what amounts to a category page on the Culture channel. I think that multi-author blogs are kind of iffy anyway, and diluting the pure voice of Coates (or any other blogger) in this way is very likely to kill their readership entirely.
The other bloggers at The Atlantic have weighed in as well, and they’re not too happy (with good reason). Here’s James Fallows and here’s Andrew Sullivan.
I’m sure that theory was that mixing up blog posts with all sorts of other content would give more exposure to the magazine content, but what it winds up doing is driving away the readers who wanted a quick fix from whichever blogger they were reading. This is especially true for the blogs that supported commenters. Any dedicated community of regulars is likely to just dissolve when subjected to changes like the ones The Atlantic has imposed. What they’re liable to wind up with is a group of commenters that are more like the ones you see on newspaper Web sites — committed cranks, total morons, and drive-by ranters who lower the value of the site every time they push the submit button.
Next we see how The Atlantic does damage control.