Notes &
Today’s ruling Democrats propose to fix our extremely high-quality (but inefficient and therefore expensive) health-care system with 1,000 pages of additional curlicued complexity — employer mandates, individual mandates, insurance company mandates, allocation formulas, political payoffs and myriad other conjured regulations and interventions — with the promise that this massive concoction will lower costs. This is all quite mad.
Charles Krauthammer - A Better Plan for Health-Care Reform - washingtonpost.com
Krauthammer isn’t always right, but here he’s spot on. I want universal health care; I just don’t understand the current Democrat approach to it. Obama’s had a remarkable run thus far, and I’m not sure why he’s spoiling it on what seems to be posturing on health care.
Edit: Uy; two anti-Obama / Dem posts in a row on my Tumblog… here’s hoping that pragmatic Obama stages a comeback against populist Obama
Edit 2 (8/12/09): Adding some content from an email I just wrote ranting to defend this piece: “Here’s the fundamental thing I don’t understand about healthcare reform… 75% of the country is “happy or very happy” with its health care. We have a clear cut problem in the fact that we have 40 million+ uninsured that we don’t (and shouldn’t) feel good about. So in addressing that problem, why do we have to convince ourselves that insuring these 40 million+ will be deficit neutral, or laughably, “cost cutting”? Why not call a spade a spade and come to terms with the idea that one way or another we need to either a) pay more to cover currently uninsured people or b) cut care from everyone else in order to stay ‘deficit neutral’. To Krauthammer’s credit, he’s actually proposing two measures that can & will save money (1. tort reform 2.
consumer choice in insurance by severing employer tax credits)… the measures don’t have to (and probably won’t) save enough money to cover 40+million to still be eminently sensible (they are)…”
