1. Paul Starr warns liberals that a public plan could become a dumping ground for the sick and poor, allowing private plans to skim off the healthy:
The great danger is that the public plan could end up with a high-cost population in a system that fails to compensate adequately for those risks. Private insurers make money today in large part by avoiding people with high medical costs, and in a reformed system they'd love a public plan where they could dump the sick. Although the proposals before Congress aim to limit insurers' incentives to skim off the best risks, the measures are unlikely to eliminate those incentives entirely. ...
Here's the delicate political problem: Depending on the rules, the entire system could tip one way or the other. Unconstrained, the public plan could drive private insurers out of business, setting off a political backlash not just from the industry but from much of the public. Over-constrained, the public plan could go into a death spiral itself as it becomes a dumping ground for high-risk enrollees, its rates rise, and it loses its appeal to the public at large. Creating a fair system of public-private competition -- giving the public plan just enough power to offset its likely higher risks -- wouldn't be easy even if it were up to neutral experts, which it isn't.
Good point, Paul Starr!
2. Ramesh Ponnuru points out that conservative opposition to affirmative action has been butting up against conservative judicial restraint and -- surprise! -- restraint has lost:
Mr. Ricci probably deserved his promotion and had a right to his day in court. But contrary to what many conservatives insist, that does not mean he should win the case. The legal arguments for his position, as for the invalidation of the Voting Rights Act, are not absurd: they include reasonable readings of Supreme Court precedent. They just aren’t originalist arguments.
To conclude that New Haven acted unconstitutionally is to assume that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment mandated a policy of strict colorblindness by state and local governments. Maybe it should have. But the historical evidence that it did is weak. Certainly the conservatives on the Supreme Court have not tried to argue that it did: originalist analysis has been notably absent from their opinions in affirmative-action cases.
Good point, Ramesh Ponnuru!
--Jonathan Chait