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I Still Hate Harry and LouiseThe spoiled brats who killed Hillary-care return.

By Timothy NoahPosted Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2008, at 7:08 PM ET

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Louise: Well, someone actually has a workable plan, called InsureUSA. It has tax relief for workers and small businesses, and special help for the working poor.
Harry: But not government-run health care.
Louise: I'm e-mailing this to the candidates!

Harry and Louise were more petulant than their creators in refusing to accept responsibility as the price of privilege. By 2000, when this ad ran, the HIAA had given its support to a Clinton proposal to expand coverage somewhat under two "government-run" poverty programs, Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program. It was a smart move, earning goodwill from the public while sacrificing little or nothing. The people to whom government insurance would be extended were by definition too poor to become paying customers. Even if they could scrape the money together for a private policy, their low economic status made them relatively poor prospects because they were likelier to experience bad health than more privileged folks like, well, Harry and Louise.

Harry and Louise sat down at their kitchen table again in 2002 to oppose the Bush administration's attempt to ban all forms of human cloning. "One bill puts scientists in jail for working to cure our niece's diabetes," Louise complained. (By now it was clear that, for all their bitching, Harry and Louise had no children of their own to worry about.) "So … cure cancer, go to jail?" Harry replied. Even for a stem-cell supporter like me, this discussion seems short on nuance. Perhaps you're wondering why health insurers would go to bat for research that, if successful, would likely increase medical costs (and, therefore, spending by insurance companies). Answer: They weren't. The ad was sponsored by a nonprofit group called CuresNow. Harry and Louise were freelancing. HIAA, which didn't like losing control over its favorite propagandists, sued but failed to halt the ad campaign.

The newest Harry and Louise ad is another freelance job. This time, the sponsor is FamiliesUSA, a nonprofit that has long pushed for universal health care, in conjunction with the American Hospital Association, the Catholic Health Association of the United States, the American Cancer Society's Cancer Action Network, and the National Federation of Independent Businesses, which represents small business. The NFIB, which in the past has opposed regulation more fervently than other business groups—and which opposed Hillarycare in 1994—has finally woken up to the fact that its members are far likelier to consume health care than to provide it. Moreover, the new ad is so deliberately platitudinous and vague about what health care reform would actually be that it's hard to imagine what the NFIB's right flank could possibly object to.

One might similarly wonder what HIAA's successor group, America's Health Insurance Plans, could object to. AHIP's president, Karen Ignani, was present at the press conference, but her organization, which recently inaugurated its Campaign for an American Solution (read: no single-payer, thank you very much), is not a sponsor of the new ad. "We strongly support the coalition's activities," Ignani said at the press conference. When I approached her afterward, she upgraded that to "unequivocal support." Then what kept the insurers from participating in the new Harry and Louise ad? Ignani said it was "not a lack of willingness on our part," which I took to mean that she hadn't been asked. Perhaps there were worries that the health insurers would want to assert too much control over fictional characters they'd created. Or perhaps there were worries of an eventual breakup once concrete proposals replace the platitudes.

Who would get custody of Harry and Louise? Whoever could sell them on a solution that, like everything else they favor in their oeuvre, is cost-free. That's why Americans identify with them, and that's why I'd just as soon they found something else to do for the next couple of years. Time to identify with someone better.