{"id":3410,"date":"2010-02-26T10:07:09","date_gmt":"2010-02-26T15:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=3410"},"modified":"2010-02-26T10:07:09","modified_gmt":"2010-02-26T15:07:09","slug":"krugman-afflicting-the-afflicted-on-the-republican-democratic-health-care-summit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2010\/02\/26\/krugman-afflicting-the-afflicted-on-the-republican-democratic-health-care-summit\/","title":{"rendered":"Krugman–Afflicting the Afflicted (On the Republican-Democratic health care summit)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his 26 February 2006 NY Times column, Afflicting the Afflicted<\/a>, Krugman comments on yesterday’s Republican-Democratic health care summit. Here is an excerpt:<\/p>\n

It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he\u2019s folksy and likable and could make his party\u2019s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, \u201cfor millions of Americans, premiums will go up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wow. I guess you could say that he wasn\u2019t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate Democrats\u2019 plan does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But it also makes it clear that this would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The \u201cprice of a given amount of insurance coverage\u201d would fall, not rise \u2014 and the actual cost to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.<\/p>\n

His fib on premiums was quickly followed by a fib on process. Democrats, having already passed a health bill with 60 votes in the Senate, now plan to use a simple majority vote to modify some of the numbers, a process known as reconciliation. Mr. Alexander declared that reconciliation has \u201cnever been used for something like this.\u201d Well, I don\u2019t know what \u201clike this\u201d means, but reconciliation has, in fact, been used for previous health reforms \u2014 and was used to push through both of the Bush tax cuts at a budget cost of $1.8 trillion, twice the bill for health reform.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What really struck me about the meeting, however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole article. I’ll just add Krugman’s final remarks:<\/p>\n

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.<\/p>\n

But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do \u2014 and they have the power to do it \u2014 is finish the job, and enact health reform.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

-RichardH<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his 26 February 2006 NY Times column, Afflicting the Afflicted, Krugman comments on yesterday’s Republican-Democratic health care summit. Here is an excerpt: It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he\u2019s folksy and likable and could make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3410","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-richardhsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3411,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3410\/revisions\/3411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}