I like Don Taylor, I like reading him as I know that there is a very high probability of reading something that he writes that will make me think long and hard about something that I thought I knew but now need to reexamine, or something that I knew that I did not know. He is a good high value read on health policy. However, I think he has a blind spot on health policy, and that is his tendency to encourage conservative wonks without enough criticism:
From RBC on 8/14/14 regarding Avik Roy’s Manhattan Institute proposal:
I am not going to go all post-modern literary critic on this (only deconstruct), in part because a lot of it lines up nicely with things I have been writing about/calling for over the past few years, in search of a political deal that could move the policy ahead….
The biggest question facing Avik’s proposal is not in policy terms or what supporters of the ACA will think, but whether any elected Republicans will be willing and able to shift gears and begin trying to move health reform ahead instead of simply looking for what helps in the next election….
I commend Avik for offering this plan, and think there is a plenty to like in the proposal itself, as we look for the next step in health reform.
A serious deconstruction of the plan shows that Roy is fundamentally trying to occupy the wonky spot that Paul Ryan has been attempting to occupy as a legislative leader — that of the wonky Serious, Honest Conservative. If that is the bar that needs to be passed, then we need to evaluate the wonkiness and honesty of the plan. Anything else is just the soft bigotry of low expectations that a conservative can write 60 pages of not seemingly gibberish with a couple of graphs and references to complex modeling.
The soft bigotry of low expectations: Conservative wonk editionPost + Comments (39)