Anthony Weiner is an honest Democrat:
S: So, Anthony, I figured it out over the break. You actually do want the federal government to take over all of health care.
W: Only in the sense that the federal government took over health care for senior citizens 44 years ago.
S: You want to expand that for all Americans.
W: Correct. I want Medicare for all Americans.
Weiner wants to destroy the private sector insurance market, which accounts for 15% of the American economy, in order to have government control health-care decisions. At least, as Jazz says, he’s honest … for what that’s worth.
It’s actually worth a lot. I wish we’d see that kind of honesty from the president and congressional leadership.
[Update mid morning]
From the Trojan Horse’s mouth: they plan on a slippery slope. Gee, what a shock.
[Early afternoon update]
More honesty from the left: the history of the “public option“:
Following Edwards’ lead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton picked up on the public option compromise. So what we have is Jacob Hacker’s policy idea, but largely Hickey and Health Care for America Now’s political strategy. It was a real high-wire act — to convince the single-payer advocates, who were the only engaged health care constituency on the left, that they could live with the public option as a kind of stealth single-payer, thus transferring their energy and enthusiasm to this alternative. It had a very positive political effect: It got all the candidates except Kucinich onto basically the same health reform structure, unlike in 1992, when every Democrat had his or her own gimmick. And the public option/insurance exchange structure was ambitious.
But the downside is that the political process turns out to be as resistant to stealth single-payer as it is to plain-old single-payer. If there is a public plan, it certainly won’t be the kind of deal that could “become the dominant player.” So now this energetic, well-funded group of progressives is fired up to defend something fairly complex and not necessarily essential to health reform. (Or, put another way, there are plenty of bad versions of a public plan.) The symbolic intensity is hard for others to understand. But the intensity is understandable if you recognize that this is what they gave up single-payer for, so they want to win at least that much.
And winning is all that matters to them.
Ahem. Getting back to Weiner, I think “honest” is a stretch. In particular I find it hard to believe that he does not know what private insurance companies “bring to the table”. The business model of insurance is quite simple: pooling risks is valuable to the individual. On average you are paying insurance companies, not getting money from insurance companies, i.e. the expectation value of insurance is negative. But what you are paying for is not lottery ticket, it is a hedge against unlikely expensive events. And that has a market value because the utility of avoiding a disruptive expense outweighs the expectation. So for the consumer, it has negative expectation but positive utility.
Now, do yo think Weiner knows this? I suppose there are two options: (1) like Chris, he really is clueless about the way things work, or (2) he knows better, but the truth gets in the way of his schemes, so he prefers to hide it. I think (2) is more likely to be the case, based on watching the interview. I think that he knows the answer, just as he knows that comparing Medicare overhead to private company overhead is deceptive (private companies bookkeep overhead that Medicare shifts to other parts of the government — e.g. revenue collection, enforcement). But he knows that most interlocutors will not be able to formulate a cogent response on the fly.
Alas, Scarborough falls into the trap of not responding immediately to Weiner’s deceptive tactics. But that has its own satisfaction, as Weiner spins further out of control, not just tipping his hand but laying out stark evidence of Democrat misrepresentation.
BBB
The House bill calls for the public option to be self-sustaining, AKA “not subsidized by the goverment.”
We regularly get House bills calling for all sorts of things that don’t happen. Here are some things the House has wanted to be self-sustaining that aren’t self-sustaining:
– The Post Office.
– Amtrack.
– Conrail, before privitization.
– Medicare.
– Social Security.
I don’t call a program self-sustaining when you have to raise taxes to sustain it.
Chyrsler did pay it’s 1980’s loans back, though.
Yours,
Tom
I find these stories about a 4 week wait for gallstone surgery and the waits for hip replacements in Canada and other countries amazing. Everyone I know who needed surgery quickly(including me) received it. I had a tumor removed in a week from diagnosis in a rural hospital. I got 4 pairs of progressive lens glasses for 150 bucks. I had knee surgery a week from diagnosis at a small city hospital. The only wait time I have is for routine check ups and that’s a convenience thing so I don’t have to drive too far. I pay NOTHING for this. Chris wants to change it. I don’t like Chris.
I understand that insurance works by pooling risks. The larger the pool, the lower the risks. What’s larger then “everybody?”
See, risk pooling supports single-payer, because then there’s only one risk pool.
See, risk pooling supports single-payer, because then there’s only one risk pool.
Which part supports doing it at gunpoint?
See, risk pooling supports single-payer, because then there’s only one risk pool.
This is correct. It’s the side effects of single-payer which are highly undesirable.
Yours,
Tom
This is correct. It’s the side effects of single-payer which are highly undesirable.
Like the socialist calculation problem, resulting in shortages and surpluses.
I understand that insurance works by pooling risks. The larger the pool, the lower the risks. What’s larger then “everybody?”
There are several things to consider here. First, you get diminishing returns from larger pool size. Variation only increases as the square root of the pool size. So having a hundred times the pool size only decreases variation by a factor of ten. For most health insurance, the pool size is already large enough to handle risk from bad luck in the pool.
Second, a public insurance pool will encourage both excessive supply of health care services and diversion of general funds. That can be made worse, if the program uses a “pay as you go” system like with Social Security, which is occasionally touted as a “retirement insurance” program.
Third, public insurance will be less efficient than private insurance because it has no incentive to be efficient. Fraud will be more common because there will be far weaker motives for combating fraud than in a private insurance business (no profit motive). Finally, because it is linked to politicians, it’ll be far more likely to accept questionable insurance claims than a private insurance business would be. A doe-eyed kid needs expensive magnetic field therapy or ground tiger penis to fight their terminal cancer? Guess who’s going to knuckle under first to the quacks and charlatans?
Finally, public insurance will have to offer rates below cost in order to lure people away from private plans. Even if we ignore this dubious diversion of public funds to a few beneficiaries, that’s a subsidy that private insurance can’t compete with.
Karl Hallowell – so now we go from “death panels” to “paying for quacks and charlatans” and “excessive supply of health care services?”
You also miss the point of the public option. The goal is not to “lure people away” from private plans. The goal is to make sure everybody’s covered. Look at the Australian system – if you don’t get private insurance (i.e., laid off, since all workplaces have to offer insurance) THEN you go on the public system.
Fraud is a problem in any system. Do you want to argue that private insurance doesn’t have fraud?
Fraud is a problem in any system. Do you want to argue that private insurance doesn’t have fraud?
Private insurance is much more motivated to prevent it (in fact, that’s one of the things that people complain about). If Medicare has low overhead costs, it’s precisely because of the lack of any attempt to do so. And is why it’s going broke.
It’s like I said before. If the power- and coercion- junkies tell you they want X, and deny that they actually want X+Y, you’re pretty safe in assuming that they’re lying and actually want X+Y+Z. If not now, in the long run. People who want to rule you shouldn’t be trusted on principle. As the bumper-sticker says, “If you want to take my gun, why would I trust you?”
I’ve read where Soros has donated a gazillion simoleons (rough estimate) to helping his boy Urkel getting his healthcare program passed. Has it ever occured to ObamaNation that with all the money Soros, the Hollywood Left and other “limousine liberals” have poured into the cause of expanding State-power, they could just buy each poor person in the US a good insurance policy?
I had a severe dislocation of my ring finger on a Sunday afternoon about a decade ago. I went to the emergency room, got x-rays, and had the finger reset in about 3-4 hours.
What’s the saying in Canada? Don’t get sick on Sunday. That 3 hour trip would have likely turned into 12 on a socialized system. No thank you!!
What’s the saying in Canada? Don’t get sick on Sunday. That 3 hour trip would have likely turned into 12 on a socialized system.
You mean like this guy, an American, who had a cardiac emergency in Montreal on a Sunday? Per his wife, we were actually in and out faster than we usually are.
The facts are not on your side.
Chris,
The broad stats show that people in the U.S. are seen faster than the people in Canada. I would be stunned if there weren’t hospitals in Canada which are on the fast end of the bell curve.
Measuring health care results is hard. I keep seeing data which suggests the U.S. system is getting something for it’s money. I just read that we had more smokers here than anywhere else in the developed world, and it is still lowering our life expectancies.
Yours,
Tom
In other words, the facts as we know them aren’t on your side either. We mostly don’t know the facts, and we aren’t likely to know them. The system is too complex.
Karl Hallowell – so now we go from “death panels” to “paying for quacks and charlatans” and “excessive supply of health care services?”
There’s so many negatives to public health care, it’s hard to take them all in. Even contradictory things like not enough and too much supply can happen at the same time with a typical shortsighted government approach. I’d rather not explore for real the possible failure modes of public health care or an attempt at universal health care. And yes, quackery will have a field day with a government plan and the extremely flexible congresspeople who hold the purse strings.