Again, from yesterday’s Meet The Press where Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne expressed his dismay that a lot of Americans don’t believe that government should or can’t deliver healthcare for all, especially where it concerns Obamacare:
Well, I think there’s something crazy when people say that Government can’t deliver healthcare. Ever heard of Medicare? Ever heard of Medicaid? And there’s a mandate to pay taxes for those things? This thing is complicated because President Obama chose to go for a model that is a market oriented model that Republicans favor of helping people buy private health insurance. That proves to be very complicated. But what you are seeing already is an enormous appetite among all the Americans that don’t have health insurance to buy it and that’s what’s going to save Obamacare. This is filling a real need in the society.
And then he goes on that all other developed nations use Government to deliver healthcare (as if America was sufficiently regressive to believe that mere people could actually handle things for themselves). Now, to use Medicare and Medicaid as paragons of great sources of healthcare delivery mechanisms only shows that Dionne hasn’t had to use either. Neither have I but I did have to often help to shepherd both my Mom & step-Dad through their use of Medicare. I also point out that both systems are facing bankruptcy and in Medicaid, may docs are no longer accepting patients dependent on those Government payments, so what practical good is it when you can use it? Seriously, the word Potemkin looms large.
But the silliest was that bit about “a market oriented model”. When Government strictly controls what must be in a policy, strictly controls the pricing levels, strictly controls the coverage bands (catastrophic, bronze, silver, gold, platinum), and controls all of the waivers, exceptions, excemptions, all of arbitrary changes to the Law itself as if it was being run by a Banana Republic, and the insurance companies bullied about and demoted to be only an outreach of Government – this is supposed to viewed as a “free marketplace”?
No, this is the further entering of Fascism into the American picture, courtesy of the incremental socialists known as Progressives – Big Government and Big (soon to be eliminated) Biz. With this Administration, this is not surprising.
But what was surprising was the lack of any pushback from the two “ostensibly Republicans” on the panel – columnist David Brooks ((who just wrote that the Executive Branch should even have MORE power with which to “get things done” and “Republican strategist” Ana Navarro.
You can’t win what you won’t defend – and if such Republicans “of note” can’t and won’t defend what is a Republican norm, a truly free marketplace, is it any wonder why the base keeps thinking “and we keep supporting tiese clowns….why”?
