Guest columnist
Everyone has an explanation for why the United States has no national health plan while other industrial democracies do. Here's mine: the Constitution.
Our founding document disfavors comprehensive national legislation -- let alone bills to reconfigure 17 percent of the economy. The Framers wanted it that way. To them, the main threat to liberty was the capture of the political apparatus by a minority faction, or even by an overweening majority. So, through separation of powers, a bicameral legislature and other measures, they made it hard for any single point of view to prevail at the federal level. This is very different from the parliaments that rule Europe and Japan in a more centralized, majoritarian fashion.
To be sure, the Framers' motives included protecting the "liberty" of Southerners to hold slaves. Nevertheless, their framework has endured. Congress has rarely even tried to enact a peacetime legislative package as sweeping as the current health proposal. The original Social Security and Medicare laws don't even compare. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which tried to fix slavery and secession once and for all, was pretty grandiose. But we all know how well that worked out.
This is the stuff of high school civics; in hindsight, it should have been more obvious to the men and women in the administration who staked so much on health-care reform.
Charles Lane is a member of The Washington Post's editorial page staff.
