-Tyler Cowen’s post from 2009: ‘What Should We Do Instead Of The Obama Health-Reform Bill‘
Richard Epstein looked pretty prescient on what the law’s specific challenges are:
‘As I have noted before, there is only one type of reform that can make progress in meeting the three goals of a sensible health care system: cost reduction, quality improvements, and public access. That reform requires massive deregulation of the many market impediments that are already in place. Lower the costs, drop the excessive mandates, and thin out administrative costs, and people will flock back to the system voluntarily’
Avik Roy summed his thoughts up nicely:
‘Any serious health reform program—left, right, or center—would involve some disruption of our existing health-coverage arrangements. What makes Obamacare such a deeply flawed piece of work is not that it disrupts our existing arrangements, but that it disrupts those arrangements by forcing people to buy costlier coverage.’
The force is exactly the problem for folks concerned about the politicization of money, the expansion of authoritarian bureaucracy driven by activists into ever more corners of American lives.
You know, something that works.
What comes next isn’t exactly clear…
As for my own conspiratorial suspicions, I expect an influential cohort, if not an editorial majority of the NY Times to soon resemble that of Britain’s ‘Guardian‘ (that’s Vanguardian to you, you neoliberal bourgeois sell-out).
Here is a Guardian headline tumblr page to help clarify: So.Much.Guardian.
Jezebellians writing about the NY Times have discovered a plot:
https://twitter.com/shaneferro/status/768177207122493440
Do I make any predictions?
Predictions require knowledge I don’t actually have and committing to a standard to which I could actually be held.
I simply brace myself for these things ahead of time, and invite you into a confederacy of predictive anticipation, dear reader.
–
From Jill Stein’s Green Party page…the whole nutty thing seems pretty red:
It’s time to build a people’s movement to end unemployment and poverty; avert climate catastrophe; build a sustainable, just economy; and recognize the dignity and human rights of every person. The power to create this new world is not in our hopes; it’s not in our dreams — it’s in our hands.
I can’t speak to Britain’s Green Party, but neither can anyone else apparently. Via David Thompson: ‘Incredibly Awkward Interview With Natalie Bennett.’
A train-wreck on the air with a lot of coughing. If some Britons aren’t engaged in the magical and doomsday cult thinking of back to nature utopianism, they’re apparently channeling that magical thinking into the Green Party political platform of free houses and money-tree utopianism. Good to know.