E Pluribus Unum

Ezra riffs on an article from Rick Perlstein:

The government should provide health insurance. The government should guarantee health insurance. It should do it because that's the right thing to do, because it'll give workers more freedom to move around, because it'll control costs, because it'll cover everybody, and because, for this job, government-involvement is the best way to handle it.

I wrote a few weeks ago that this isn't about covering the uninsured. If we want to do that, increase the size of Medicaid and slap down an insurance mandate -- it's easily doable. This is about validating our vision of government. On health care, we're right and they're wrong. The public sector is right and the private sector is wrong. We can't be afraid to say that. We can't be afraid to fight for that. And we can't settle for a plan that validates our ends but rejects our means. Validating government is the end because it's the best way to accomplish this. It's also, incidentally, the only way to redeem the Democratic party.