Steve Reads

This makes me want to scream, because I see it so much and it misses the point in so many ways:

["Centrist" Democrat Mary] Landrieu [of Louisiana] says it makes no sense to create a third government health care program when Medicare and Medicaid are already headed for insolvency.

Here’s why that’s wrong and misses the point:

1. The entire U.S. health-care system is growing unsustainably. Medicare’s costs are growing more slowly than the health-care system’s costs as a whole. So if Medicare is pushing toward insolvency, so is the whole U.S. health system.
2. The private health-insurance system has, to some extent, been able to avoid obviously falling apart by throwing people off its rolls. If private insurers were required to accept all comers, its problems would be even more manifest.
3. In any case, Medicare is “headed for insolvency” because it works off a fixed budget. Well, Part A (hospital insurance) does. Parts B (reimbursing doctors), C (Medicare Advantage), and D (the drug benefit) are funded out of general revenues, so they can only go insolvent when the U.S. government goes insolvent. Medicare Part A is forced to be responsible in a way that the rest of the U.S. government is not. Why does no one ever talk about the Department of Defense being “headed for insolvency”? If Landrieu is so concerned about the public fisc, why doesn’t she push for the DoD to be funded out of a dedicated payroll tax? Then every few years, we could go through a public rending-of-garments ritual over the DoD’s impending bankruptcy. I would enjoy this very much. At least then we’d have parity: conservative Republicans shedding crocodile tears over how Medicare will have to be cut to keep it afloat, and my party doing the same for the military.

I wonder if it’s fair to label Landrieu’s words here “lying.” I wonder if she’s aware of the ways in which she’s perverted the debate. In fact, I wonder if the journalist who interviewed her is aware of her errors of fact.

A “debate” over health care would be nice, but first everyone has to understand the way the world works.