I find the debate peculiar for a number of reasons:
1) Picking out one measure of health care “costs” to compare systems is sadly reminiscent of the arguments for socialism. Do you remember those arguments? Under socialism:
* “Think of how much money we will save on advertising!”
* “Socialism will lower costs by maximizing economies of scale!”
* “Money will be used for production not profits!”
Exactly these arguments are regularly trotted out in the debate over administrative costs in health care so color me unimpressed. To be clear, the point is not that these statements are false – the point is that these premises to the argument are all in some sense true it’s just the conclusion, socialism is more efficient than capitalism, which turned out to be false. We tried that and it didn’t work. In other words, you have to compare systems not arbitrarily pick out for comparison one type of costs.”
How about let’s treat borrowers like adults. For that matter, how about treating all of us like adults (even if many of us don’t always act that way)? At least those of us who are legally adults?
Does Steny Hoyer have any idea how comments like this come across to normal people?
“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.
Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.
In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.
So, therefore, it’s not reasonable to expect people to read it. Right.
I have an radical idea. How about shorter bills?
[Update a few minutes later]
I think that this would be an item for a new Republican Contract with America.
If California is really where national trends start, the nation is in trouble. The good news, though, is that an anti-big-government revolt may be brewing out there.
[Update]
Michael Barone: Are Americans getting cold feet over Obama economic proposals? Let’s hope so, finally.
We got a Wii fit a few months ago, and it tells me that my BMI is high, though within the normal range (23.5), and it’s always encouraging me to set a goal to lose weight, but I don’t think that 170 lbs on a 5’11” frame is overweight, particularly when my waist size is only a couple inches more than it was when I was a kid. We ought to start debunking this.
So far that you can’t even see it from there. A devastating analysis that I hope everyone on the Augustine panel reads. And note that this is something that the press, even the space press, rarely, if ever, talks about.