What's Wrong with Single - Payer?

There’s one point that just shouldn’t be up for debate throughout this whole health insurance reform tussle:  the American Left ideally prefers a single – payer health insurance regime.  See here, here, and here.

As Rep. Barney Frank correctly notes, single – payer health insurance is a political impossibility.  But why don’t the President and other Democratic policyholders and left-leaning advocates of health insurance reform make an intellectual argument for it?

One of the great failings of the American left – as opposed to the European left for example – is that there has never been an advocate for a truly large and active role for government, especially in the economic lives of Americans.  The Democratic Party – more akin to a gumbo than tomato soup when it comes to ideological consistency – is certainly the home of the governmental activists, but it has never itself been an advocate for governmental advocacy the way perhaps Labor has been in the UK or the PSOE in Spain.  I think the course of the health insurance reform debate reflects this reality.

The public option, as Rep. Frank notes, is simply single – payer health insurance through the back door.  But by passing the public option off as another “choice” while being dishonest about the long term consequences of such a program, aren’t Democrats simply putting off the inevitable single – payer debate?  If things go as Rep. Frank (and I imagine most folks on the left) wish, whether we go with single – payer or with a public option now, 10 or 20 years down the line we’ll have single – payer anyway.  But at no point will anyone with any political heft have argued that that policy is most desirable.

Should health insurance be a product offered by private industry for consumption by individuals?  A valid question; but nobody’s asking it.  Shouldn’t Americans as a society treat health insurance like national security – an area of public policy that is solely the purview of the government?  Also a valid question; but nobody’s asking it.  The American left has in the White House probably the most eloquent and personally popular advocate for more governmental interventionism.  Why won’t he make an argument for his ideal policy?

Crossposted at The Diasporist