‘Barack Obama used to oppose health care fraud—up until the moment that opposing fraud conflicted with his goal of preserving ObamaCare.
Ezra Klein argues that this will make the rollout easier.
As for me, I can’t do much but make the argument that attempting to control and socialize 1/6 of the economy will likely mean less freedom for young people forced to subsidize the old with another entitlement program. It will likely mean a less dynamic private sector, and less social mobility and incentives for risk-taking especially among those young people (just when the bills for Social Security and Medicare are coming due).
It will likely mean politicians working towards short-term goals overseeing the money supply more than they do now (doing what politicians do, which often has as much to do with perception and reelection, rather than principle). It will likely mean bureaucracies having more say in very important decisions in your life rather than insurance companies, and bureaucracies’ interests and incentives tend to follow their own internal rules, pegged to politics, yes, but far away from what is most dear to you and perhaps even less responsive.
I think it’s fair to say this is what Obama and most supporters of the ACA wanted. The details weren’t as important in many cases, the political promises they made sometimes formalities. The trick was to push it through and then keep pushing.
They want it to stick.
Related On This Site: Avik Roy At Forbes: ‘Democrats’ New Argument: It’s A Good Thing That Obamacare Doubles Individual Health Insurance Premiums’
Richard Epstein At The Hoover Institution: ‘The Obamacare Quaqmire’
Richard Epstein At The Hoover Institution: ‘Watching Obamacare Unravel’
From The New England Journal Of Medicine Via CATO: ‘The Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate’From If-Then Knots: Health Care Is Not A Right…But Then Neither Is Property?… From The New Yorker: Atul Gawande On Health Care-”The Cost Conundrum”…Sally Pipes At Forbes: ‘A Plan That Leads Health Care To Nowhere’…
Pingback: Steynian 480nth | Free Canuckistan!
I agree
I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?