For once, can we please fast-forward through the next two years of kabuki theater and actually get some work done?

Now that universal subscription to the health care plan has been thrown out, the next two years are already scripted:

1. Obama will appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

2. The Supreme Court will uphold the Virginia ruling.

3. The health care plan will be thrown back into the 2012 election cycle, with both sides licking their chops over how they can turn this to their advantage.

4. Depending upon the results in 2012, one of three things happen:

4a. victorious Republicans repeal it down to smoldering embers.

4b. a mixed Congress and Obama fight it out for another four years, resulting in a further watered-down program.

4c. victorious Democrats inexplicably come up with very similar results to 4b, because that’s what they seem to do.

5. While all this is going on, people will suffer and die needlessly. It’s a high cost to pay for theatrical entertainment.

The problem here is twofold. First, 2014 was already a rather attenuated start date for serious provisions of the bill. The above battle pushes it out to 2020 or so, no matter which side is victorious, because the other side will be able to tie it up endlessly.

Second, the whole premise of the bill is that there are certain economic issues which need to be considered in order for the plan to be good policy. If you want universal health care access, lower overall costs, and minimal additional costs for those who can afford their own insurance, then you must have universal subscription. It’s a simple matter of how insurance works—Benjamin Franklin had this figured out in the 18th century.

The way most countries deal with this problem is to make it governmental. Everyone gets health coverage, and pays for health coverage in the form of “taxes,” not in the form of commercial payments to private for-profit companies. It was the added for-profit loophole that shifted the health care plan smack dab into conflict with the commerce clause—and even I’ll say that yes, there are certainly Constitutional issues if the government has the right to tell you that you must have a commercial interaction with a particular industry.

We all know how this ends: a watered-down compromise which meets the requirements of whichever faction has political momentum. And we all should know that these compromises result in bad policy. Compromise can work when the thing on the table isn’t the apolitical factor that makes the policy worthwhile. This isn’t a question of compromising on core principles; it’s a question of compromising on incorporating reality into your policies. The watering-down of the stimulus bill, by reducing its size and making 1/3rd of its cost non-stimulative, allowed us to endlessly debate Keynesianism and the core question of whether stimulus is good policy. We still don’t have strong data on whether a true Keynesian stimulus, of the size Keynes would have dictated, would have worked.

Ignoring reality is bad. Creating laws which don’t provide good data on whether your core principles are accurate encourages ignoring reality.

There’s an obvious way to avoid all of the above: if the health care debate is going to reopened—and make no mistake, it already has been—then it’s time to revoke the initial concessions made by Obama and the Democratic leadership. We need a loud and influential minority to back single-payer health care, and to start that debate with facts and figures from the decades of real experience and evidence from the countries that have tried it. Such as the US, in the form of Medicare and the VA. The “public option” was a compromise from this starting point. Let’s stop forgetting how many concessions have already been made to create the bad policy we have.

Obama is fighting hard to sell his philosophy of incrementalism. Right now, he’s not doing well. I agree with him that he’s not getting credit for how much he’s accomplished in the last two years—the problem is that it’s not a philosophical question how he accomplished it. If he wants to sell his base on compromise and pragmatism, fine. But when the compromise results in bad policy and ineffectual government—which provides ammunition to an opposition dedicated to creating ineffectual government—then it’s the role of his supporters to say, “No sir. Not this time.”

My biggest disappointment with Obama is that I expected him to know this already. But it appears that he needs a course correction. He wants to chart a path of moderation and compromise. That means that it’s our job on the left—a job we have been spectacularly failing at—to make our case without compromise, because only once we have defined our side of the issue can there be a halfway point from there.

Dennis Kucinich has a proposal which makes this easy: universal access to Medicare. It’s a simple law, easy to state and easy to sell. We need to put this on the agenda, politically and culturally. We are unlikely to win—but our goal isn’t to win. Our goal is to move the middle back into the realm of good policy. That’s not where it is now.