Good gossip in a case like this has a palliative effect, preventing me from launching into Poulantzian ravings about the state as arbiter between class fractions....
MM
>>> delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU 05/14/02 04:33PM >>>
>Brad DeLong wrote:
>
>>Look: When we had power we *tried* to do national health insurance
>
>You tried to do "managed competition," a dreadful abomination that
>few people outside the Jackson Hole group cared about.
>
>Doug
What can I say? Clinton's appointment of Ira Magaziner may have been the biggest disaster of his term. It was the only time in the Clinton administration that the Treasury got flattened when it committed its full weight to oppose somebody inside the White House. Marina Weiss, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Health Care Affairs (and conductor of the Treasury staff orchestra) wanted to do single-payer. Lloyd Bentsen wanted to do salami tactics: first kids, then the unemployed, then the uninsured, and by the end of the process you have everyone in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program...
Brad DeLong