| Some sympathy for Don Verrilli Mar 28th 2012, 20:33 Reid Cherlin, who served as the Obama administration's spokesman on health care, is sympathetic to Solicitor General Don Verrilli. The Affordable Care Act, he says, is really, really hard to explain: Don is someone I worked with and respected, so I will leave dissection of his efforts to those who are farther removed and better schooled in Supreme Court procedure. But I will say this: having spent a year of my life getting paid to defend the ACA as the White House spokesman on health care, I feel for the guy. Health care reform is very much worth defending, but going about that defense is where things get, well, difficult.
It would have been easy for Verrilli—or any of us—to explain single-payer health care. "Look," we could have said, "the government is paying for everyone to have coverage." End of story. But single-payer is not what our brilliant, world-leading political system gave us. What it gave us is essentially a halfsy—an extraordinarily confusing patchwork in which some novel legislative mechanisms are used to induce individuals, businesses, insurance companies, and states into doing things that add up to concrete good. Read full article >>        | |
