Good Trade / Bad Trade

In lieu of another boring post about health insurance excise taxes let’s talk raw politics. At the moment, there are two big disagreements between the moderates and the liberals on health care. On the one hand, the moderates want to finance a large amount of the subsidies through an excise tax on expensive health insurance plans. Liberals don’t like that idea. On the other hand, the liberals want a robust public option while moderates are looking for ways to kill or defang this.

There are two ways you can imagine these problems getting logrolled away. One is to “level up” in which both sides get something that they thing will be a transformative tool to change America for the better—the excise tax and a robust public option. The other is to “level down” in which both sides force the other to back now—no excise tax, and weak or absent public option. Either would be a compromise, but leveling up would be a much better outcome than leveling down. Which happens will tell us a lot about the health of our political institutions.