Three quick comments on Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race yesterday:
First: Wow!
Second: Fox’s pollster had one of those focus groups. There were about twenty people in it. They split about 50-50 between Brown voters and Coakley voters, which pretty much matched the result of the vote. What was particularly interesting was this: When they asked the Coakley voters whether the Democrats in Congress should try to get a health care reform bill passed before Scott Brown could be seated, more than half of the Coakley voters said no. They said they were in favor of the health care bill, but they didn’t want it passed this way. That speaks highly of those voters. It will be interesting to see what the Democratic leaders in Congress do.
Third: The Democrats have argued that, with their health care plan, they could extend coverage to people who don’t presently have it and yet costs would not go up and quality of care would not go down. But people didn’t believe them because people aren’t stupid. We are always told that, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. More health care insurance and no more cost sounds too good to be true – and people don’t believe it.
But what if the Democrats had said this: We have a moral obligation. People need to have health care insurance. If they can’t afford it, we need to help them so they can afford it. It is going to cost money, but it gives all of us the security of knowing that, if we lose our health care insurance, we will still be protected. And, most importantly, it is the right thing to do. Making sure everybody has health care insurance is a moral obligation that the United States has to its citizens. We need to provide it, and we are rich enough to do so. Maybe we can’t do it right now, since we are in a severe recession, but we can set up the program now and put it into operation in three or four years when the economy is growing again.
But that argument was never made – or at least not made very often. Instead, it was always one of those "too good to be true" arguments – and the people didn’t believe them.
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Update (1/20/10 1:15 am): Here is a link to the segment on Fox with the focus group its pollster was running.
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