Frum asks when Pawlenty will have to defend it:
A question for Tim Pawlenty at the next Republican debate. “When you became governor in 2003, Minnesota had under 395,000 citizens without health insurance. In 2008, the last year before the recession struck, Minnesota had 446,000 citizens without health insurance. Do you regard that as an important failure of your administration? If not, why not?”
Ezra Klein compares uninsurance rates in candidates' home states using the above graph. Jonathan Chait sees what Frum is getting at:
The obvious point is that a failure to impose government regulations and subsidies onto the health care system can never be viewed as a liability by conservatives — and certainly not a liability remotely on par with Romney's — regardless of real-world consequences. In the conservative movement, a more free market system is ipso facto superior.
The Dish 