Many people are satisfied with their current insurance! This fact has been widely confirmed in polling; in large part, this fact is shaping our current debate. But why are those people so satisfied? Could it be because they’ve never heard this? See THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/20/09:
PILGRIM #8/11/09#: Universal health care, state of the art technology, complete free choice of doctors and hospitals. In some ways, the health care system of Switzerland looks ideal. Many lawmakers and academics, including Professor Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton, have studied the Swiss system.
REINHARDT #videotape#: It's a first-rate system, virtually universal coverage, with very high quality care.
PILGRIM: Everyone in Switzerland has to buy health insurance on their own. And there are about 60 different insurance companies to choose from. Premiums run between $6000 and $7000 a year for a typical family.
Say what? The Swiss are running a first-rate system—and that’s what their premiums cost? Let’s state the obvious: In part, Americans are satisfied with their own coverage because they’ve never heard that.
In large part, Americans have never heard such things because of the silence of “liberals.” These careerists are movin’ on up in the system. They have to be Serious People.
Go ahead! Name the “liberal journal,” or the career liberal journalist, who has screamed and yelled and shouted and exclaimed about the truly remarkable way our health care spending is looted. You can’t really grasp the extent of this looting until you consider the foreign experience—and good solid Serious Career Liberal Thinkers will typically avoid doing that. Go ahead! Name the liberal journal, or the career liberal journalist, who has helped the public know about—consider the meaning of—these truly astonishing data:
Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:
United States: $7290
Switzerland: $4417
France: $3601
United Kingdom: $2992
Average of OECD developed nations: $2964
Italy: $2686
Japan: $2581To anyone with an ounce of sense, it’s obvious what those data mean. A real progressive would scream and yell about those remarkable data. But in the career liberal world, all is silent. We’ve been silent for the past fifteen years—since the last time we failed.
(Note: Paul Krugman discussed similar data in a series of columns in 2006. Michael Moore discussed this situation in 2007, in Sicko. But go ahead: Name the liberal journal, or the career liberal journalist, who used the work of Krugman or Moore as a springboard to a long, shrill discussion. Which of our liberals did that?)
People are happy with their current insurance for a fairly obvious reason: They don’t know how badly they’re being looted! In part, they don’t know that basic fact because our career liberals simply won’t tell them. “We’re not Europe,” Serious People write. And that has largely been that.
But uh-oh! Things are getting so crazy these days that glimmers about these facts have seeped into the mainstream press corps. Huzzah! In this morning’s New York Times, London-based Sarah Lyall even discusses an editorial composed—where else?—across the pond:
LYALL (8/21/09): Arguments against the [British] health service by Republicans overlook the fact that while it costs half as much per person as the American system costs, “it delivers results which are on some plausible measures actually superior,” The Economist said in a stern editorial. “And it does this while avoiding the disgrace that so shames America, of leaving around 46 million people, some 15 percent of its population, without any form of health insurance.”
[...]
[British] commentators continue to be amazed at what, in their minds, is an irresponsible distortion of the argument by people from across the Atlantic.
“If American politicians peddle falsehoods about what goes on in other countries,” The Economist wrote, “Americans are correspondingly less likely to appreciate the extent to which they are being let down.”
To read the full Economist editorial, just click here.
the above via www.dailyhowler.com
It's not just this particular Congress and this particular President who will be at fault for health care reform being so must less than it could have been. There's been a fundamental failure on the part of seemingly informed and media-identified "liberal" American leaders--many of these are merely center-left careerist politicians (and often would-be members of the glitterati)--to compelling, persistently, and bravely communicate to our republic's electorate simple information about health care in other nations.
Yes, it is a horrendously misinformed--perhaps clinically self-delusional or at worst genuinely stupid--politician who, for instance, thinks that evolution is not a scientific fact; but, it is at least a savvy one who convinces others that his or her perspective is correct or at least somehow intellectually as legitimate as the perspective of science.
It's a similar situation (though admittedly not as cut and dry as the contrast between conspiracy theories versus science as the two things apply to evolution) with health care reform discussions. It may matter morally if a politician peddles falsehoods in the service of an idea or argument, but it rarely diminishes the likelihood of the idea or argument's success, especially in the short-term (which is the time scale in which most democracy's big decisions are made), just so long as if he or she communicates it more effectively than are communicated rival ideas.
In a representative democracy, it is always a mistake to assume that "the facts will speak for themselves" or that--preceding that--the facts will somehow magically make themselves known to all.
