Writes Robert L. Samuelson:

They’ve left the impression that somehow magical technological breakthroughs will produce clean energy that is also cheap. Perhaps that will happen; it hasn’t yet. They’ve talked so often about the need to control wasteful health spending that they’ve implied they’ve actually found a way of doing so. Perhaps they will, but they haven’t yet.

Jennifer Rubin comments:

The result is a return to a style of government that was popularized decades ago: large federal bureaucracies, volumes of regulations and ever higher taxes to pay for all of it. It isn’t very “modern,” as we have come to think of the 21st century. If the trend in everything from entertainment to media is decentralized, personalized, and competitive then the Obama government seems rather old-fashioned. When one thinks of creating, monitoring, and enforcing healthcare policy for 300 million Americans and regulating control carbon-output for thousands of businesses you come to appreciate how large and complex the government must be. Do we really think any government can pull this off?

No it cannot. That is also the problem with trying to develop a national health care plan. Europeans often say that the American government should do what most of their governments have done: find a way to ensure every single citizen has health insurance. They forget, however, that European countries are much smaller than the U.S. Instead of comparing individual European states to the U.S. they should compare the E.U. to the U.S. When they do, they often suddenly realize just how big America is, and how difficult it is for a central government to insure its inhabitants.

On the other hand, conservatives are wrong to advocate maintaining the status quo as well. Instead, they have to find a way to empower states. This problem should be solved on a state level, the federal government can coordinate the effort(s).