Matt Grossmann and I write a fair amount about health care in our book Asymmetric Politics because it’s a political issue that represents a particularly effective example of our main thesis: that the Democratic Party is organized as a coalition of social groups while the Republican Party is controlled by an ideological movement. Now that the House Republican leadership has released its health care reform proposal—the long-promised plan to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act—it is clearer than ever that the two parties are fundamentally different in character. CONT.
David A. Hopkins, Boston College