Follow-Up on Health Care, With More Stuff About Veto Points

Yglesias responds, conceding that the Swiss analogy doesn’t really work “except in the broad sense that Switzerland is the other example of a developed country that came late to the universal health care game thus did it in a way that involves a lot of compromises with existing interest groups.” To invoke our shared institutional hobbyhorses, I’d also note that it’s not a coincidence that the Swiss system also has an unusually high number of veto points for a European system. (Ellen Immergut‘s analysis is definitive.) But, still, American institutions remain an outlier here, much to the detriment of the possibility of a good health care bill (and ensuring that even if a decent bill somehow passes it will be vastly more expensive than necessary.)