Tuesday, June 28, 2011

A Little More on Healthcare (orig. 5/17/2011)

1) E.J. Dionne discusses the current crop of healthcare lawsuits in his column yesterday in the Washington Post:

"As you watch the lawsuits against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act work their way through the courts, consider that what you are really seeing is a great republic tying itself into as many knots as possible to avoid facing up to a challenge that every other wealthy capitalist democracy in the world has met."

"Yes, all the others have decided that it’s both more just and more efficient for all their citizens to have health insurance. Countries do this in different ways. Some rely primarily on government, others on a mix of private and public resources. But given the costs of health care, even the most conservative governments have concluded that the public sector has to play a large role in its provision."

"And we Americans are thoroughly inconsistent. We supposedly oppose government health care, yet Medicare — essentially a system of socialized insurance — is an exceedingly popular program."

Complete column here:


2) The Washington Post's Ezra Klein manages to shrink the history of looking for a healthcare solution into a single paragraph:

"A capsule history of health-care reform is that Democrats began with single-payer and Republicans, led by Richard Nixon, countered with an employer-based system. Then, in the 1990s, Democrats proposed an employer-based system and Republicans countered with an individual mandate — which Romney actually passed in Massachusetts in 2005. Then, in 2009, Democrats proposed a system based around an individual mandate and Republicans countered with a vague promise to 'repeal-and-replace.' "

Here's the link to complete column:


Do we have anything between our ears? Just asking... 

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