Accelerate health care reform before it's too late

Paul Starr was a senior advisor for health care reform under President Clinton, and he’s the author of a celebrated history of the American health care system, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. He has weighed in on the current health care debate in a New York Times op-ed piece.
In addition to commenting on the public option (it would enroll too few people and cost too much) and letting states run health exchanges (too many states would resist), he points out the importance of accelerating the timetable for reform. His concerns are similar to those raised last week by Maggie Mahar (emphasis added).

For Congress to put off expanding coverage to 2014 would be asking for a lot of patience from voters. It would also give the opponents of reform two elections to undo it. President Obama would have to run for re-election in 2012 defending a program from which people would have seen little benefit.
To speed the process, the legislation ought to give states financial incentives to adopt the reforms on their own as early as mid-2011. … The final deadline for the federal government’s expansion of coverage should be no later than Jan. 1, 2012.

Could conservatives reverse health reform in 2013?

According to a new poll by the Washington Post,

[N]early eight in 10 Republicans and GOP-leaners alike want party lawmakers to try to stop the health-care-reform proposals Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are pitching; almost all these GOP voters feel “strongly” about their opposition to health-care reform.

The good news, however:

Perhaps no single indicator reveals the [Republican] party’s current fractures as do the poll’s findings on the question of who Republicans are looking to in 2012: About four in 10 said they do not have an opinion or cited “nobody” as their preferred candidate.

Sources:

(Hover over book titles for more info. Links will open in a separate window or tab.)

Paul Starr, Fighting the Wrong Health Care Battle, The New York Times, November 28, 2009
Jon Cohen and Dan Balz. A party both united and divided, The Washington Post, November 30, 2009
Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The rise of a sovereign profession and the making of a vast industry