Health Care Reform is a Zombie Policy

Peter Suderman notes that the Democrats’ health care plans have to play a finesse: on the one hand they promise that everything will get better; on the other they reassure you that most things will stay just the same. Tricky!

Worse, much worse, for those of us who hope that Congress passes or kills health care reform – either, don’t care which, just do it sharpish! – is the terrifying prospect that health care reform is the zombie monster of all policy zombie monsters:

On a note that’s scary in a different way, the piece quotes Harvard health policy professor Robert Blendon as saying that even if the bill passes, the health care issue is never going to go away*:

If the bill becomes law, Blendon said, the campaign for maintaining support for health care reform would only just begin. “It is not really over in people’s mind,” he said.

This is one of the side-effects of health care reform I suspect people think about less: Reform won’t just mess up our health care system, it will infect our political system; the more our politics and our health care are tied together, the more our political debates will become indistinguishable from our health care debates.