Edwards on Health Care: Me Too! Me Too!

As we all get ready for the official release of Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan, John Edwards, who is trailing her in the polls by about 27 points,  has just finished a high-profile health-care announcement of his own.  Liberal health-care wonk Ezra Klein reports that:

[O]ne element of the health reform strategy Edwards will announce today is a bill, to be submitted on his first day in office, ending health care coverage for the president, the Congress, and all political appointees on July 20th, 2009, unless they’ve passed health reform that accords with four non-negotiable principles Edwards will detail in the speech. If they don’t pass comprehensive health reform, they lose their coverage until they do.

This is as much a political stunt as a policy move.  Edwards wants to be the biggest and the baddest on the Democratic block when it comes to health care, so the driving force behind the announcement is probably a pretty basic desire to divert attention away from Clinton.  It’s Edwards waving his arms at the press and yelling, "Don’t forget about me!" as Clinton sails toward the nomination. There’s no real reason to get up in arms about it, as Edwards has virtually no chance of heading the Democratic ticket, much less actually making it to the White House.

That said, I’ve never found this line of argument convincing.  It’s sort of a chickenhawk argument applied to health care: Congress doesn’t have to worry about health insurance themselves, so they don’t think about the practical effects of their policy choices.  But, for good and for ill, that’s exactly what elected leaders are supposed to do–it’s more or less their entire job description.  I suspect a significant contingent of our elected officials neither understand nor would be particularly affected by, say, net neutrality legislation (among other things), yet we have them voting on it anyway.  Representative democracies function through the creation a small cadre of people who get to vote on policy. that means the rest of us get to go about our lives and business without voting every few minutes, but it also means that those making the decisions won’t always be particularly affected by their votes and won’t have personal incentives at stake.

It also rests on the assumption that everyone ought to be given equal benefits as members of Congress, that, because the government gives certain types of compensation to its top officials, there ought to be some sort of guarantee of similar compensation to everyone in the country.  Sounds nice, of course–and no doubt it’s politically potent–but until everyone is an elected official, it doesn’t really make sense.