On Different Worlds

George Rebane

To maintain some perspective on the national debates, I regularly read, view, and listen to leftwing media.  Debate may be too fine of a word for the type of exchange that today goes on between conservatives and liberals.  In fact, we do live on two different worlds.

This was again made clear in the recent issue of the liberal flagship Nation where Katha Pollitt (‘Healthcare We Can Believe In’) laments that Team Obama is not taking us to the promised workers’ promised land fast enough.  She writes “Healthcare is a right, part of the common good, something everyone should have, and if you can't afford it in the marketplace, the government will provide it.”

This is a woman from the liberal legions who see every human need as an automatic ‘right’ without evincing a clue that she knows what is a right versus, say, a privilege (more here).  In her panoply of state provided and guaranteed goodies, rights bloom from every nook and cranny.  She sees no cost or convenience hindering the provision of rights to the people, all we need is proper political orientation and will.  People who are too dimwitted to understand any of this are immediately marginalized beyond the social pale.

As of this writing, it is far from clear how much of the vocal opposition to reform represents wider popular feeling and how much is a mobile mob of gun nuts, birthers and teabaggers paid for and organized by lobbyists and Republican outfits like Americans for Prosperity, Conservatives for Patients' Rights and FreedomWorks.

The ‘debate’ has now gotten so sharp and angular that the usually civil and measured Peggy Noonan, WSJ columnist, has just penned a piece - From 'Yes, We Can,' to 'No! Don't!’ - that finally takes to task the blizzard of Obama’s lies which in polite company were formerly known as ‘continued campaign rhetoric’.  Here Noonan makes the case that Obama has slid to the “slippery” level as a politician, and is now seen as such by all who are not gathered under his messianic robe.

When Mr. Obama stays above the fray, above the nitty-gritty of specifics, when he confines his comments on health care to broad terms, he more and more seems … pretty slippery. In the town hall he seemed aware of this, and he tried to be very specific about the need for this aspect of a plan, and the history behind that proposal. And yet he seemed even more slippery. When he took refuge in the small pieces of his argument, he lost the major threads; when he addressed the major threads, he seemed almost to be conceding that the specifics don't hold. …When you seem slippery both in the abstract and the particular, you are in trouble.

There are probably some semantic strides between ‘slippery’ and ‘sleaze’.  But I find myself among those having already taken those steps in their assessment of the current administration.  And so we send our unheeded missives from one world to another.  E Pluribus Unum, but what kind of Unum?

Comments

[Duckie Narveson]

Why it's a medatative OM state! Unnnnn: I sure didn't vote for him! vs. Ummmm: Where IS my leadership? Or, UnUm, UnUm, It's off to Sacramento We Go...

[Yoshi Dad]

Mr. Rebane: Uncontroversially, the U.S. pays roughly double what single-payer nations do in health care costs. The outcomes in virtually every public health measurement like infant mortality, life expectancy, etc., are worse. The World Health Organization's study ranks U.S. outcomes 37th in the world, between Slovenia and Costa Rica. The Bee says that it's as though the U.S. has the health care of Costa Rica, but pays six times more for the privilege.

None of this is controversial unless you gin up controversy in the service of private profit.

[Henry Reardon]

Yoshi Dad- I think it would be more helpful to see how many new treatments, procedures, cures, and overall advances health care gains via the Free markets versus the single payer nations. I would expect that the profit motive is still the best driver of invention. I know US based biotech companies are detoured be the fact that only the USA pays them well for their efforts... take away the USA as the only carrot and see what happens to new medical technology (I pray we never see that day).

Most importantly I would contend that we have more liberty than any nation with a single payer system.

[George Rebane]

Mr Yoshi Dad - The simplistic utility function you cite does not even begin to cover the particulars of US healthcare, the delivery of which I grant is tremendously distorted by government interventions at all levels. However, you do seem to denigrate decisions and enterprises that are "in the service of private profit." It has been our ability to service private profit over our two centuries that has made America the aspired destination of the world's poor (I am one of them). I am also among those who will defend your right to private profit in all your undertakings should you be so inclined. When we make healthcare 'free' and into a national common, then its cost will truly skyrocket and services decline. That this argument makes no sense to you only underlines the 'different worlds' point I argue in this piece.