Just now everyone's talking about health care. I want to talk first about concrete.
Concrete is a marvelous substance. There's a reason it is the backbone of modern cities, and some much-loved ancient treasures, like Rome's Pantheon, as well as much-hated eyesores, like Boston's appalling City Hall and North Korea's notorious "Hotel of Doom": It's cheap. It's strong. It's versatile — until it sets. Then you're basically stuck with it.
That very inflexibility is probably one reason that buildings like the Pantheon survived for us to admire them. Other ancient treasures were torn apart by the locals looking for building materials, but concrete buildings could not be repurposed stone by stone.
Faithful readers may see what I'm getting at: Some forms of government policy are built of political concrete. Once done, they cannot be renovated, added to or even destroyed without immense cost; for that reason, they tend to go on much as they always have, for good or for ill.
This was the problem the Democrats faced with Obamacare. Other countries, it was often observed, had a national guarantee of health insurance; surely, we could build a system very much like those. But the other countries had built their systems earlier, when there weren't so many concrete towers already in the way. By the time Obamacare came on the scene, America already had government programs that were propping up health care for almost everyone in the country: tax-subsidized employer-sponsored health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA. No one was willing to shoulder the cost of knocking those things down and designing a rational, well-built structure to take their place, so instead the administration threw up an annex next to the Medicaid edifice, and tore down the little remaining patch of ground that wasn't government-subsidized, and put up a new tower to hold its residents.
The planning was haphazard, the work shoddily done, and the result kept threatening to collapse.
And yet it was locked in. That whole "political concrete" thing. For the enthusiasts, the very difficulty of alteration was not a bug but a feature, because it meant that it would be hard for Republicans to undo. So we were all left with a subpar system that is difficult to either repair or replace.
That is unfortunate, but it is now a fact, and Republicans, like so many opponents of Brutalist architecture, are going to have to contend with that reality. We cannot simply get rid of what Democrats built, and then perhaps, at some more convenient date, start over with a sounder design. The old structures are gone and will not spring back up of their own accord if we knock down what's there now. All you get from a hasty demolition is a big pile of rubble.
