Bartels’s Unequal Democracy and the Gang of Six
If there’s one thing our elite press corps loves, it’s centrism. They cling to a romantic ideal of bipartisanship–even when they’re discussing necessarily ideological endeavors like health care reform. Thus it comes as no surprise when the NYT’s Herzensohn & Pear can think of no more critical angle on the gang of six “centrist” Senators now at the center of the health reform debate than the fattening snacks that fuel their deliberations.
Those with a more skeptical constitution might note that the Gang of Six represent less than 3% of the US population — a rather slender thread of popular support for whatever solution these striving solons support. Yet they don’t even appear to be acting in their own constituents’ interests. It turns out that a majority of the gang of six–Senators Baucus, Snowe, Conrad, and Grassley–hail from states with extraordinarily concentrated health insurance markets. As Catherine Arnst of Businessweek reports, “such market concentration has become a potent argument for supporters of a public insurer,” which would especially benefit consumers in those states. Yet that’s exactly what the Gang of Six has immediately taken off the table in reform talks:
Already, the group of six has tossed aside the idea of a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers, which the president supports but Republicans said was a deal-breaker. Instead, they are proposing a network of private, nonprofit cooperatives.
Those nonprofit cooperatives are not likely to have much of an effect on spiraling health care costs.
The sudden popularity of this non-solution is one more indication that Larry M. Bartels’s book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age is essential reading for understanding today’s politics. Bartels predicted a possible “debilitating feedback cycle linking the economic and political realms: increasing economic inequality may produce increasing inequality in political responsiveness, which in turn produces public policies that are increasingly detrimental to the interests of poor citizens, which in turn produces even greater economic inequality, and so on” (286). As the poor uninsured in states like Maine, Montana, and North Dakota see real relief slipping away, they are about as likely to become disaffected and drop out of the political process as they are to hold their senators to account. It’s hard to worry about voting and politics when you’re worried that aches and pains are endangering your job.
