Len Nichols is the top health-policy guy at the New America Foundation. He’s spent the past few months trying to negotiate a compromise between the Left and the far Left over the creation of a new government health insurance program that would compete with private insurers. With John Bertko, Nichols wrote a paper on how to create a level playing field between a government program and private insurance.

Yesterday’s CongressDailyAM, however, had an interesting article that sheds light on Nichols’ sense of fair play. According to the article:

Nichols has floated the idea of writing into law a requirement that certain changes to the system would require a two-thirds vote to pass rather than a simple majority.

Never mind that such a requirement would guarantee that the new program would breed even more stagnation and death than Medicare and Medicaid do.

What Nichols proposes is that a Democratic Congress should be able to create a new Fannie Med by a simple majority vote in each chamber, but if a subsequent (Republican?) Congress wanted to repeal it, they should face a higher bar.

Keep that in mind when you hear talk about a level playing field.