Healthcare Legislation = Political Power

Via Greg Mankiw, Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier, Dean of the Harvard Medical School, offers his thoughts on the current healthcare legislation. A snippet:

the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

Now why would our benevolent elected leaders do such a thing? Randall Holcombe has the fairly obvious answer:

The only answer I can think of is politics. They said they were going to pass health care reform, they ran on that platform, and now they are determined to do it despite the widespread recognition that if they succeed the outcome will make the nation worse off.