Lincoln and health care

Courtesy of News in the Rock, an article in the New York Times about Senator Blanche Lincoln, one of our AR senators. The headline is somewhat misleading, as they call her a Democrat, but she's really something else - whatever a centrist party in the US might be called. And it's interesting, because there is very little doubt in my mind that if you took a poll in Arkansas, they would overwhelmingly reject free health care, even though they need it more than the US as a whole (51 percent of the people here have employer or private health insurance, as opposed to 58 percent for the US as a whole, according to the Kaiser Foundation). Interestingly, I don't necessarily put this down to stupidity - the US government has a horrible track record of running things, in large part because of our ambivalence to public funding of, well, anything. We get the worst of both worlds (and, it might be argued, Arkansas more than most).