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Timothy Noah Calls Out Repubs on Health Care Shenanigans
Want to pay less for health care? You won’t if certain senators have their way. Slate’s Timonthy Noah follow the threads of some weird and wily arguments about health care today in his “Lemon Economics.” He calls attention to five senate Republicans who are planning to defend the private health insurance industry to the last breath and vow to block the creation of public plans. Noah catches these lawmakers in a specious argument: They are finally owning up to the fact that government health insurance programs like Medicare out-perform their private counterparts both in delivering benefits and in keeping prices down. But get this: The senate Republicans use that as an argument against them. If there are more public programs, they reason, how will the private sector compete? By getting their act together, that’s how. Noah reminds us that this debate is about how to serve Americans’ health care needs, not how to protect inefficient businesses from reform. With so many people currently rolling the dice on their health due to high costs, health care has become of the top policy issues of the downturn. Writing for Black Voices, Matthew Scott notes that a recent poll shows 65% of Americans worried about how to pay for health care and prescription drugs.
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Good for Timothy Noah and SLATE! Mitch McConnell, Charles Grassley, and virtually everyone else in the GOP are contemptible on this issue and just about any other issue. If people are unnecessarily sick and stay sick because they don’t have health insurance, if people die, that’s less important to McConnell et al. than defending the interests of the worst health insurance companies. Marie Antoinette said: “Let them eat bread!” McConnell, Grassley, and their reactionary GOP colleagues are saying: “Let them buy Bandaids!”
Thanks for reading, Bob. We do need to get serious as a nation about our health care situation – it’s both unacceptable and inhumane.
The health care situation in the U.S. is shameful. Looking at comparative data for Western industrialized nations… seeing where the U.S. stands on measures such as our infant mortality rate…
it’s sickening. And criminal.
The US does indeed come up short in international comparisons. I have a great fear for the mentally ill, who have already been shafted by health insurance companies ()when they have coverage. Now, many will go without insurance in a time of great stress, while public facilities are overstrained and underfunded. How we treat people with such needs is a measure of our humanity – and we’re not measuring up…