random bit on health care
by Jon on Dec.09, 2009, under Babble, Politics
I haven’t had much time to pontificate here lately, and haven’t said much about the health care bill, despite it being the only thing anyone’s really talking about.
Anyway, Kevin Carson nails a few key things:
[...] The point, Welch said, is not that a socialized system is better than a private system. The point is that their honestly socialized system is better than our socialized corporate system masquerading as a “private” one. He’d prefer a genuinely free market system to either the French or American system. But enemies of Obamacare need to drop the bullshit about the American healthcare system being “the best in the world,” and defending it as “our free market system.” Anyone with direct experience of foreign healthcare systems will be more than happy to expose such lies.
[...] The fact that we’re dealing in the U.S. with a choice between two or more alternative state-private mixes is one reason I haven’t gotten too worked up about the whole Obamacare debate.
I especially don’t understand why the public option, of all things, is where self-described opponents of a “government takeover of healthcare” chose to draw a line in the sand. [...] the public option would actually have represented a net decrease in statism. The major components of the healthcare “reform” that everyone agreed on were a naked power grab by a state-enforced cartel, forcing the entire population to purchase insurance at cartel prices and taxing the public to buy it for those who can’t afford it. The public option, on the other hand, would have been entirely self-financed after the initial seed money of a few billion, and nobody would have been forced to buy it. But it would have offered price competition to members of the insurance cartel.
The only other thing I’ll say is that I agree with Freddie, I think the Wyden-Bennet plan has a lot of potential, and I’d probably be less ambivalent about the whole issue if that plan was getting more consideration, particularly in its provisions towards getting us out of our employer-based scheme.