Piecemeal, but in the right direction

Nathan Newman defends the "piecemeal" nature of measures like Maryland's Fair Share Health Care Act and Chicago's living wage bill for large retailers:

It is a perverse corporate trick to demand complete across-the-board regulation all at once as the condition for even experimenting with a reform. In fact, all industries aren't alike, so differential regulation often is needed. In fact, industries regularly go to government asking for exemptions from various regulations or for various tax breaks based on that exact argument. So while businesses regularly demands differential regulation to relax taxes or regulations, they claim "discrimination" when they are subjected to higher tax or regulatory responsibilities.

[snip]

Those who worry about "singling out" Wal-Mart or retail businesses or any subset of firms for initial reforms are fundamentally ignoring the whole history of progressive legislative change. It has inevitably been an incremental, piece-meal endeavor. The comprehensive laws people celebrate today are the product of decades of incremental amendments based on original piecemeal reforms.So celebrate the Chicago ordinance to raise wages for employees at large retailers. Yes, it's a piecemeal reform but that is the rock on which cathedrals of broader change are built. Liberals should remember their own history in understanding that basic fact.

That line of argument seems right when it comes to living-wage legislation, but I don't think it adequately justifies the FSHC Act, at least not in the same way as the Chicago bill. The FSHC Act accomplishes two political goals: 1) it takes Wal-Mart to task for its bad treatment of its employees, and 2) it strengthens the belief that health care is a right for all Americans. These are both laudable, but the Act's policy upshot is that it entrenches the employer-based health care system in America that has long been a major obstacle to making health care accessible and affordable to everybody.

If the Act builds up enough political will in Maryland that we pass some more comprehensive reform, such as occurred recently in San Francisco and Massachusetts (see Newman's own Progressive States Network for details), then the FSHC Act, whether or not it is upheld on appeal, will have had a positive influence. But I would rather that reform, even "piecemeal" reform, happen in a more linear manner.