Substandard Health Care For All

The true believers can make things sound really logical and convincing. Who are you going to believe, them or your lying eyes? The nakedness of the emperor must eventually be disclosed, but will we all be outfitted similarly before we recognize it?

Try this compelling piece from that bastion of balanced reporting, the NYT via the Dallas Morning Worker:

This Won't Hurt a Bit

There's some priceless stuff in that. Read this quote of the Great One:

"If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care, if they tell us that they're offering a good deal," he asked, "then why is it that the government, which they say can't run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical."

Sounds great until you consider that government, which really can't run anything very well, will be setting the prices, doling out the care and creating a regulatory web which will tie up even the insurance Gullivers quite tightly. It is imminently logical and inevitable.

Or read this about the savings to be realized when the government is in charge:

Indeed, the prospects for such savings are precisely what have the opponents of a public plan so terrified. Behind the boilerplate about big government, rationing and all that lies the real concern: fear that the public plan would succeed.

No, Mr. Krugman, I'm not afraid that a public health care plan will succeed. I lived my life in a public health care plan called military medicine. I've waited in clinics, dealt with incompetent medical technicians, gone decades without seeing the same doctor twice and lain in an intensive care ward pressing the call button for a couple of hours while listening to the night shift down the hall discuss whether Leno or Letterman had the better monologue. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I don't want a national healthcare system because there has never been any evidence that government could run any service industry better than a free market.