Stuff to Read

Via Ezra Klein, the Republican argument against Democrats passing health care reform.

Paul Krugman has a good column on the lies people have come to believe about HCR. The biggest lie is that HCR would be too expensive, when in fact it would save money, especially compared to doing nothing at all.

Example, from Krugman:

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.

Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.

Kevin Drum: “Yes, the Health Care Bill Really Does Pay for Itself.”

Anything else worth reading today?

14 thoughts on “Stuff to Read

  1. Hard to believe but, and I’m quoting the figures, that waste fraud and abuse in the medicare program costs the government between $700 billion and $1 trillion/year.

    Should we eliminate the private health insurance consortia, we’d save at least one-third of every health care dollar – $350 billion spent on the private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork.

    Then of course there’s the fact that since 2006 the health insurance consortia have increased their profits by 428 percent – only possible by increasing income while/and decreasing outgo.

  2. You have an acronym problem – HCR (Health Care Reform), not HRC (Hillary Rodham Clinton).

    Paul Krugman has a good column on the lies people have come to believe about HRC. The biggest lie is that HRC

  3. Here’s an Article about Israel’s latest fuck you to Mideast peace the Palestinians and the Obama administration. I say it’s time to cut off funding. HaHa I made a funny!

  4. http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp
    (Sorry, but I lost my directions someone gave me on how to make it linky. I would appreciate a reminder of those succinct directions, which I used with success the time I could find them. I promise to do better if given another shot.)

    This was linked on a local blog, and it shows the theory-laden, reality-impaired views of Mr. Paul Ryan on health care reform. It is of no relation to reform, but it sure is heavy on the “let the market decide” sort of “principle” that the Righties use to sucker the rubes. Not that I think the current HCR plan is so wonderful, but this seems to be the alternative, which addresses exactly no aspects of the problem other than making “Die soon” seem logical.

    @Felicity: If facts mattered, your excellent comment above would drive us to a solution of the problem. Sadly, the link above shows why facts do not matter.

  5. Dave S.,
    Thanks for the note. I saved it in word processing this time, which I thought I had done earlier.

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