Partisanship, Dysfunction, and Racial Fears: The New Normal in Health Care Policy?

Partisan politics snarled both the passage and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This essay examines partisanship's effects on health policy and asks whether the ACA experience was an exception or the new political normal. Partisanship itself has been essential for American democracy, but American institutions were not designed to handle its current form-ideologically pure, racially sorted, closely matched parties playing by "Gingrich rules" before a partisan media. The new partisanship injects three far-reaching changes into national health policy: an unprecedented lack of closure, a decline in the traditional political arts of compromise and bargaining, and a failure to define and debate alternative health policies. We can get a better sense of how far partisanship reaches by turning to state health policies. The highly charged national debate has migrated into some of the states; others retain the traditional politics of compromise and problem solving. There are preliminary indications that the difference lies in the dynamics of race and ethnicity.