Krugmanology 101 (Noam Scheiber & Stephen Spruiell)

[Eric Biesel]

Originally Posted by AemJeff

The politics of single payer aren't "unworkable." The evidence is that only a few elections would have had to occur differently to have allowed for a different outcome. That's a reflection of political vagaries and chance. There's a difference of several orders of magnitude between that, and the sorts of changes embedded in Ryan's proposals. This is something that Ryan is obviously fully aware of. It's also something the Republican House leadership was just as obviously aware of. Ryan's proposal was clearly a rhetorical gambit, not a serious legislative proposal.

I'm curious as to what evidence you have that the democrats only would have needed "a few" more seats to enact a single payer system. They needed all sixty to get the legislation enacted without even a public option ebedded. The bill very nearly failed in both the house and senate after it was watered down far more than liberals had wanted. It doesn't seem plausible to argue that going much further, like complete single payer, would have been doable with only a few more senate seats when having 58, and, in effect, 60 seats wasn't enough to keep chants of "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SOCIALISM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" at bay long enough to enact the public option, much less a credible single payer system.