June 18, 2009 9:03PM # You’re for Fair Competition, You Say? By [Michael F. Cannon](https://www.cato.org/people/michael-f-cannon) --- SHARE 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](http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/modest_proposal_competing_public_health_plan) 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. ##### Related Tags [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).