It is the poor that are mucking up the free market health care system in the US. ( That and the tax benefits given to employers for providing HI to their employees. ) There should be a comprehensive network of government run HC clinics and hospitals in the country. People pay what they can afford and receive decent, rationed care. Similar to the care received in England. This accomplishes a number of good things. The poor get the care they need. Prices in the free market HC system are no longer distorted in order to cover the free care given to the indigent. Medicare and medicaid can be eliminated because the elderly poor have the government facilities to go to for their care. People in the free market system have a fallback for their care in the event they develop a high cost illness that their HI contract does not cover.

Only a truly formidable intellect could hold the above two positions simultaneously.

C´mon guys....socialized, universal healthcare alongside private insurance is the only moral, as well as practical solution. Establish that as a given, and the rest will fall into place...no doubt about it. We can to do that and jump-start the space program to put a man (or woman) on Mars. The rest of the conversation on this issue is just blah, blah, blah.....

The 'smart jew' and 'thousands of dead' attacks against Lieberman from Chaitt and Klein are surreal enough but the Ahab-like fixation on Joe from Jane Hamsher is a wonder to behold. Demand that the wife of a politician you disagree with be fired......for being married to the guy? Feminism indeed! And Hamsher touts her bona fides as a 'cancer survivor'........while promoting socialized health care that has a worse record than the current US private when it comes to cancer survival rates......whoops!

David Frum:

A neoliberal worries about the poor, a social democrat worries about the rich.

No, social democrats traditionally worried about the working class, specifically blue collar labor, working conditions, strengthening the unions, so workers can bargain for higher wages, protectionism, training and retraining, education, culture, housing for the masses, services like banking, ambulances to service factories and working class neighborhoods, recreational facilities for the working class and a whole host of other things. They were adversarial against those who don't work (including capitalists) and to the Prole hating Bourgeoisie. Social Democracy in Europe is in disarray because they started caring about immigrants, cultural marxism, social engineering, welfare freeloaders and redistribution i.e. paternalistic handouts and the institutions that are in charge of managing these handouts and social programs. The contemporary liberal elite is completely detached from the lives of those they claim to represent. The narrow focus on statistical analysis of the income distribution and unimaginative redistribution approaches is all they can come up with nowadays

Quoting harkin: The 'smart jew' and 'thousands of dead' attacks against Lieberman from Chaitt and Klein are surreal enough but the Ahab-like fixation on Joe from Jane Hamsher is a wonder to behold. Demand that the wife of a politician you disagree with be fired......for being married to the guy?

Feminism indeed!

And Hamsher touts her bona fides as a 'cancer survivor'........while promoting socialized health care that has a worse record than the current US private when it comes to cancer survival rates......whoops!

Jane Hamsher once again proves to lack both brains and class. That may also be why she works at firedoglake as that makes her a model employee.

Parker's take.

Quoting harkin: [...]

The wingnut howling in defense of Hadassah Lieberman is nothing short of comical. What, still feeling guilty for the decade of venom you all spewed at Hillary Clinton?

Quoting bjkeefe: The wingnut howling in defense of Hadassah Lieberman is nothing short of comical. What, still feeling guilty for the decade of venom you all spewed at Hillary Clinton?

The point of his post isn't to defend Lieberman. The point is to attack a woman. Harkin does not post, except to attack women or minorities.

Quoting harkin: Hamsher touts her bona fides as a 'cancer survivor'........while promoting socialized health care that has a worse record than the current US private when it comes to cancer survival rates......whoops!

Actually, Harkin, the mortality rates are very similar. The difference is in the survival rates. That sounds like a paradox, but it isn't - because mortality is defined by the percentage of people who die of cancer, while survival is defined by the percentage of people who are diagnosed with cancer and do not die. The difference, in other words, is in the rate of diagnosis. And before you say, aha! those dastardly Euro-socialists don't care enough to screen their population for cancers! - there are serious questions about the evidentiary basis for all this screening that goes on in the USA. Also, it's bogus to compare socialized medicine, which is available for all the citizens of a country, with the US private system, which is not. So your comparison is wrong twice over.

Wow. It's absolutely mind-boggling that David holds that the insurance companies are powerless. Whatever else may be the case, they hold monopolies over most marketplaces, can charge whatever they want, and can deny coverage on whatever whim takes them. David's analogy with Walmart isn't quite right, because the insurance companies actually DO want as many customers as they can get, they just don't want to reimburse them. It would be like Walmart ringing up your purchase and then randomly taking back the purchases of a portion of their customers, without refund. Insurance companies want as many customers as possible. until it's time to deliver what the customers have paid for.

Quoting miceelf: Wow. It's absolutely mind-boggling that David holds that the insurance companies are powerless. Whatever else may be the case, they hold monopolies over most marketplaces, can charge whatever they want, and can deny coverage on whatever whim takes them.

David's analogy with Walmart isn't quite right, because the insurance companies actually DO want as many customers as they can get, they just don't want to reimburse them.

It would be like Walmart ringing up your purchase and then randomly taking back the purchases of a portion of their customers, without refund.

Insurance companies want as many customers as possible. until it's time to deliver what the customers have paid for.

Actually, David is right according to Uwe Reinhardt -- who's kind of a patron saint of health care reform in TR Reid's book, _The Healing of America_. If I remember correctly, Reinhardt makes exactly David's point at the end of the second Health care episode of _This American Life_ "Someone Else's Money". Reinhardt thinks insurers in this country are too weak when it comes to bargaining with the providers. They may have near-monopolies locally in some states, but the provider networks are bigger and more

This discussion still angers me. Specifically this part. The long term effects of this will kill us. The recession that will happen in 5 years or 10 years will be worse then it otherwise would have been, had we shown greater discipline in the process. The problem of moral hazard is that it's never a good idea to punish it RIGHT NOW. It never pays off right now. Everyone agrees that the problem was that the fed / treasury policy was too inconsistent, and too hackneyed. Maybe we would have been better off being smarter then fast. If the policy of the United States government is to pay billions of dollars to Rich people when they screw up, then make that the active policy and make it explicit. This is the ONE thing every economist on this subject agrees. They may disagree that this should be the policy, but the fact that only those rich people or strong political constituencies that Paulson / Bernanke / Geithner liked got the money, and those they didn't like got screwed is the worst of all worlds. Look if it's the active policy of the United States

This thing just still burns me. Better to be fast then smart. GRR! One of the objections at the time was that if you move fast in these half-hazard methods, it will create regime uncertainty for one, and two the process can become corrupted by kleptocrats and elites and it will be hard to stop them from doing some very bad things. Ask the Indiana Pension Funds just how nice it was that we acted fast at saving Chrysler, over turning the rule of law, because the treasury was able to buy off the other losers, and the Democrats were able to pay off a political group. BETTER TO BE FAST THEN SMART!

The idea that Walmart saves American consumers money is arrogant nonsense. Walmart's lower prices has forced almost all American manufacturers to fire their American workers and move to other countries (mostly China) for the cheaper labor and then to create lower and lower quality products. 20 years ago you could buy a Hoover vacuum cleaner for $250 - a lot of money then, yes, but it would last twenty years or more. The thing just could not be broken. Now you can get a Hoover at Walmart for less than $100 but it will be broken down and useless in less than one year. How is this a savings Mr. Frum? And since my earning power has dropped (because the factory where I once worked is now in China so I am unemployed or underemployed) what good are Walmart's low quality/low priced goods to me? Oh, I can work at Walmart for $11 an hour, but I can't afford their pricey health insurance which costs an employee about 5k per year...why is it everything there is cheap except their employee benefits?

Quoting richpom: 20 years ago you could buy a Hoover vacuum cleaner for $250 - a lot of money then, yes, but it would last twenty years or more. The thing just could not be broken. Now you can get a Hoover at Walmart for less than $100 but it will be broken down and useless in less than one year.

That's the hidden inflation of declining quality.

Quoting claymisher: That's the hidden inflation of declining quality.

That's the soft bigotry of low expectations!

Quoting richpom: The idea that Walmart saves American consumers money is arrogant nonsense. Walmart's lower prices has forced almost all American manufacturers to fire their American workers and move to other countries (mostly China) for the cheaper labor and then to create lower and lower quality products. 20 years ago you could buy a Hoover vacuum cleaner for $250 - a lot of money then, yes, but it would last twenty years or more. The thing just could not be broken. Now you can get a Hoover at Walmart for less than $100 but it will be broken down and useless in less than one year. How is this a savings Mr. Frum? And since my earning power has dropped (because the factory where I once worked is now in China so I am unemployed or underemployed) what good are Walmart's low quality/low priced goods to me? Oh, I can work at Walmart for $11 an hour, but I can't afford their pricey health insurance which costs an employee about 5k per year...why is it everything there is cheap except their employee benefits?

Whether or not WalMart existed, low skilled labor would have lost value in the

Quoting claymisher: That's the hidden inflation of declining quality.

Oh Yeah? You think cars nowadays are lower quality than in the 70s?

Does anyone remember when Walmart's advertisements were about all it's American built products? I used to shop there then. There are still choices!

Quoting richpom: The idea that Walmart saves American consumers money is arrogant nonsense. Walmart's lower prices has forced almost all American manufacturers to fire their American workers and move to other countries (mostly China) for the cheaper labor and then to create lower and lower quality products. 20 years ago you could buy a Hoover vacuum cleaner for $250 - a lot of money then, yes, but it would last twenty years or more. The thing just could not be broken. Now you can get a Hoover at Walmart for less than $100 but it will be broken down and useless in less than one year. How is this a savings Mr. Frum? And since my earning power has dropped (because the factory where I once worked is now in China so I am unemployed or underemployed) what good are Walmart's low quality/low priced goods to me?

Exactly correct. But the reason DC insiders like Frum or Obama support "free trade" and 'Walmart' has nothing to do with economics - its all ideology with people like Frum and Obama.

Quoting Unit: Oh Yeah? You think cars nowadays are lower quality than in the 70s?

Good lord, I didn't say everything got worse. Sheesh.

Quoting claymisher: Good lord, I didn't say everything got worse. Sheesh.

Ok so there's a hidden inflation for some products and a hidden deflation for others, due to changes in quality. I'll agree to that.

Quoting Bloggin' Noggin: Actually, David is right according to Uwe Reinhardt -- who's kind of a patron saint of health care reform in TR Reid's book, _The Healing of America_. If I remember correctly, Reinhardt makes exactly David's point at the end of the second Health care episode of _This American Life_ "Someone Else's Money". Reinhardt thinks insurers in this country are too weak when it comes to bargaining with the providers. They may have near-monopolies locally in some states, but the provider networks are bigger and more powerful. Reinhardt argues that, for this reason, the addition of the public option won't do much good.
Based on the This American Life analysis, it sounds like we'd do much better if the government bargained for a single price with the providers on behalf of all insurers, then let the insurers compete on service.

Yes, I thought this was an excellent diavlog and that David had some points which were correct and should be discussed. They don't change my opinion that the best response is single payer (and for the most part I found Klein pretty much consistent with my views), but contrary to his expressed views, I'm totally