Here's the exact quote, which comes in the first paragraph incidentally, a fact that strongly suggests you were depending on the gullible not to check your own veracity....which is of course, lacking.
"In the beginning," says a character in a Peter De Vries novel, "the earth was without form and void. Why didn't they leave well enough alone?" When Washington is finished improving health care, Americans may be asking the same thing."
George F. Will - A Regrettable 'Fix' on Health Care - washingtonpost.com (4 August 2009)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/26/AR2009062603457.html
http://tinyurl.com/nnujrj
A "well-crafted argument"? I'm afraid I must have missed that part because all I saw was a cheap effort at using selective statistical manipulation to achieve the same old tired fear-mongering that the US ruling class has been using quite successfully to motivate gullible authoritarian conservatives into dieing for their leaders causes, and doing it on their own dime. And being proud of it! (grooaan.. why do they do it??!)
What you will rarely see in stories like this WSJ piece, is the use of Canadian statistics and/or anecdotes to make their case. This despite the universal health-care we Canadians adopted long ago. And the reason for that is simple. The typical American doesn't know anybody in Great Britain whom they can ask whether these things are true or not, whereas this is not the case when it comes to knowing somebody who is living or has lived in Canada.
Because if they did ask, they would hear the very same thing I am going to tell you about this attempt to deceive you. It's Bull-S**t! Period.
Even if the insurer was Mother Teresa and all of the staff saints, insuring medical care would be a disaster. It comes down to economics, which I will try to make as simple as possible.
When medical care is treated like a market, as with insurance, it does not respond to price signals well. The prices can go up to a unbearable level without a drop in demand. Only when the price goes beyond that breaking point, and only if the doctor or an intermediary fails to adhere to the Hippocratic oath, only then does demand start to shrink. The introduction of insurance does not change the factors determining those threshold prices for the patient. So an increase in the fees which the doctor or hospital presents in a bill to an insurer will have no effect on demand until the out-of-pocket expense to the patient approaches those same thresholds. Thus 80% coverage (20% copay) insurance causes the market for a medical procedure to increase the medical costs fivefold (500%) so that there is no change in patient out-of-pocket expenditure.
Thus, both the present circumstance (private insurance) and the Obama plan (public insurance) fail to address the reason why medical costs are so high: insurance. Note that both require that employment pay those inflated costs. The private insurers get their premiums through benefit packages which companies make available to their employees, now increasingly mandated. The public insurers get theirs through mandatory Medicare payroll deductions and, if that fails, through the income tax payroll deductions. Thus, both approaches will cause the collapse of our health care system as unemployment worsens.
See my site for an alternative providing real health care reform.
Thanks,
CPK
I get so frustrated and angry when I see the lies and the liars that must be getting hired by the insurance industry down there to tell you that our Canadian health-care system is second-rate and that we have to wait for months to get treated for our concerns. Thanks for at least trying to set the record straight. The fact is that if you were to poll Canadians on the thing we are moist proud of, to name something we have that the great and mighty US of A doesn't have...it would be our health-care system!---- by a wide margin!!
We look at the trouble down there getting basic treatment for injuries that could be life threatening, and shake our heads in amazement over why you all put up with a system that is little different than the one seen in third world dictatorships where ruling elites have the best care available while the people doing the actual work --- and thereby getting injured the most --- are the very people who struggle to get decent attention! It's mind-boggling that First World, apparently advanced people from a modern civilization, would reject something that the rest of us consider to be the inevitable result of a society that embraces basic, human decency!
We should stop calling for "health care reform." What we really need is INSURANCE reform. Using this term may help focus on the core problem of our ailing health-care system.
We should stop calling for "health care reform." What we really need is INSURANCE reform. Using this term may help focus on the core problem of our ailing health-care system.
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