Mr. Cutler Goes To Washington

span>A Harvard professor moves to Washington!<

In an administration that boasts having recruited economists Jeremy Stein and Jeffrey Liebman, law professor Cass Sunstein, and former President Lawrence Summers, the news of Harvard Dean David Cutler’s decision to leave Cambridge, MA, hardly seems remarkable. Indeed, it barely registered in the news.

As I’ve noted here, this isn’t Cutler’s first journey to D.C. At 28, already on the Harvard faculty, he set out to remake American health care, joining the Clinton Administration. The efforts, of course, collapsed, and Cutler returned to Cambridge, MA.

Though he has busied himself with a variety of administrative roles (he’s now a dean) and academic pursuits (he has written papers on everything from the value of health-care spending to the rise of obesity in the United States), he has continued to be a fixture in Democratic politics. He advised Senator Kerry in 2004 and, more importantly, took a major role in President Obama’s campaign.

Cutler will feel at home in Washington. He has advocated a robust role for the federal government in health reform: paying for performance, mandating employer insurance, and expanding coverage. His book primarily focuses on championing the first idea on this list.

With another bright liberal in the White House, economist Gregory Mankiw refers to “the best and the brightest” -- and the disaster of Vietnam.

Maybe. Paying for performance, the fashionable idea that Washington will decide which health-care providers are doing good work and should thus be rewarded with more money, seems not simply ideological but impractical -- the health wonk equivalent of the 1970s idea that government could pick winners in industry.

But whether or not these ideas really work, President Obama oversees a health-care team that is staffed by veterans of Washington (like Office of Health Reform Deputy Jeanne Lambrew) and of past Democratic health-care campaigns (like Washington-bound Cutler). In other words, they know how to successfully sell them to Congress.

Conservatives who dream of a new 1994 legislative debacle need to wake up.