Robert Samuelson wrote a truly moronic column on health care in WaPo yesterday. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Andrew Sullivan has posted a sound rebuttal, including spot-on commentary by, of all people, Joe Klein. http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/
Because Samuelson is mouthing the baloney about the supposedly unaffordable cost of health care reform that seems to be evolving into the MSM's conventional wisdom on the subject, I thought an additional posting highlighting this nonsense was worthwhile.
Samuelson's central point is that it is a myth that the uninsured don't receive health care. Indeed, Samuelson's argument is that the uninsured actually receive too much health care, as he cites a statistic claiming that the uninsured currently use 50 to 70% as much health care as the insured do. Samuelson argues that if we throw these health care gluttons into the system by requiring them to have health insurance, and provide government subsidies in order to enable them to afford it, the costs of health care will obviously skyrocket and America will go broke.
As Klein properly points out, Samuelson's argument rests on statistical "nincompoopery". http://swampland.blogs.time.com/... Samuelson ignores the reason why the cost of providing health care to the uninsured is so high under the current system. It is of course true that the uninsured currently do have access to health care. After all, we don't see the millions of uninsured Americans dying in the streets because they are not getting health care. What is relevant is how they are getting health care. They are being treated in emergency rooms, frequently at public expense. That is why the costs of providing health care to the uninsured are so high under the current system.
As any health care professional will tell you, emergency room treatment is the most inefficient, and expensive, method of delivering health care services. This is why our current system of financing health care is truly insane and ultimately fiscally unsustainable. It is also why all of the projections about the alleged costs of health care reform are nothing more than gibberish.
The simple truth is that cost reduction is impossible without serious reform of the manner in which health care is financed. The reason why health care costs in America are out of control is precisely because of the bizarre way in which we finance the system. The system is too chock-full of unnecessary middlemen and laden with opportunities and incentives for profiteering that do nothing to improve services.
If I have any criticism of the way in which Obama and the Democrats have approached the issue of health care reform, it is that they allowed themselves to get sucked into the debate of making sure that there would be a mechanism to pay for the purported costs of reform, such as the high-income surtax included in the House bill or the limitation on deductions for high-income taxpayers Obama has proposed. The fact is, however, that we don't even know what the true costs of health care reform are. Ideally, a good enough reform program should cost very little, if anything. The rest of the civilized world does it - provide high-quality universal health care at far less cost than the US does - and there is no reason why we can't do it as well.
So I fervently hope that Obama and progressive Democrats tell Baucus and the bipartisan fetishists inside the Beltway that they should take their half-assed phony "reform" bills and stick them where the sun don't shine. The goal should be to establish a revamped financing system that makes sense, and that includes making a government-run insurance program such as Medicare available to everyone.
How do we pay for it? I suggest we enact it first and then, after we really know what the cost of true reform actually is, we can tackle the question of funding. Indeed, instead of just coming up with stop-gap measures to pay for health care reform like surtaxes and/or limitations on certain tax deductions, the Democrats should take on a real challenge: doing something about cleaning up the swamp generally known as the tax laws of the United States. It's not only smart policy, it's smart politics. Let Obama and the Democrats establish themselves as national heroes by enacting popular health care reform that will propel them to substantial victories in 2010 and 2012. Then they can use their political capital doing the really tough stuff: enacting real tax reform.
But the troubling undercurrent here is the question why this isn't self-evident to every thinking person in Congress? Do they just not understand? Are they just too timid? Or are they just too corrupted by the interest groups profiting from the inanities of the current system: trial lawyers, drug companies, and of course, insurance companies.
Samuelson's column really helps put this dilemma in focus. While I frequently disagree with him, I often find that he is capable of making solid, nuanced economic analyses. Surely, he cannot believe the nonsense he wrote in this column. So I repeat the question I posed in the title of the Diary: is he a fool or a tool?
I have no doubt that we can overcome the objections of fools. However, if our system is hopelessly corrupted by tools, prospects for the future look a lot more dim.