Megan McArdle will be putting her own smug, glibertarian spin on the perils of health care reform in 1 pm chat today.
It’s probably too early for a drinking game, so take a swig of whatever beverage you like every time you read “free market”, “innovation”, or “obesity”.
If you hear “Ayn Rand” or the name of any character in an Ayn Rand novel, finish the whole glass.
If you read “death panels” or “death books” (from McArdle herself, not a questioner), you have permission to euthanize yourself.
Update. Chopper has an interesting angle:
i’m sure she’ll say something about how under a government-run option ted kennedy would never have lived past the age of 50.
I doubt we’ll hear that, but be on the look out for inappropriate Ted Kennedy comments.
Update. Kill yourself twice — death books and death panels:
There’s a lot of confusion about the death panels. Most proponents of health care reform think of it as referring to the end of life counseling issue. Now, I will say that I recently read the VA’s end-of-life booklet, and I did find it rather creepily biased towards choosing to pull the plug. That may just be me, and I have no reason to think that this was intentional, but it does show that it really matters how you frame these issues.
But the core issue about “death panels” is something like the proposed IMAC board, which will assess Medicare treatments. If you look at Britain’s NICE, they use something called “quality adjusted life years” to decide whether treatment should be given or withheld. That means that the system is biased against treating old people and very sick people. That is good central allocation of resources, I suppose, but it legitimately worries people–and these are the kinds of worries I hear people expressing at Town Halls.
chopper
i’m sure she’ll say something about how under a government-run option ted kennedy would never have lived past the age of 50.
General Winfield Stuck
I think I’ll pass Dougj. The few decent functioning brain cells I have left deserve some respect. Lose them and it’s time for the drool cup.
donovong
I would rather watch paint dry then to waste my time reading anything that idiot has to offer. She gives bloggers, libertarians and gerbils a bad name.
ts
I’ll buy a drink for whomever gets in a question about Freedomworks.
BR
Folks need to be calling their senators about Kennedy’s Medicare for All act:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/8/26/113848/510
PeakVT
Suggestions:
“What specific examples of insurance companies adding value can you cite?”
“If innovation is so important, shouldn’t we prevent medical companies from spending more on sales and marketing than they do on research?
“Do you have an argument that doesn’t boil down to IGMFU?”
Morbo
Careful, DougJ, if you’re giving us permission to euthanize ourselves if we hear from McMegan about death panels and death books then rumors will start swirling about a government plan for mandatory euthanizations of anyone who has the audacity to talk about death panels or death books. At the FEMA camps, obviously.
Zifnab
She’ll alternate between lies, bullshit, and question dodging. She’s a dishonest debater and has been debunked repeatedly this last month. Why would I want to give her discussion the eyeballs that pay her bills?
fuyura
Question for Megan:
“Both my grandmothers are already dead. Does this mean I can support Obamacare?”
Napoleon
You have to wonder if the WaPo has some kind of reward program for a staff member who can come up with someone mind numbingly stupid to write an Op Ed piece for and/or participate in a chat, because they do come up with some mind numbingly stupid people for both.
rapido
Actually, due to her constant insertion of Britishisms in her blog, I have a drinking game that I play everyday. Anytime “chap” “of an evening” “I dare say” or “lad” appears I put a hammer to my forehead.
flounder
I pointed out her column from a few weeks ago where she showed she didn’t even have the slightest idea what people pay for health insurance (she underestimated it by 300%, based on paying for health insurance for a few months in the early 2000’s).
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/08/its_all_in_the_budget.php#comments
I asked what someone so ill-informed on the basic tenets of the health care debate (i.e. costs are going up at unsustainable rates) is doing answering questions about it.
freelancer
Who’s gonna be the Leeroy Jenkins of todays particular Wingnut Warcraft Welfare Epic?
Ulysses (not yet home)
Megan is a text Leni Riefenstahl, only without the talent, vision or skill….
Sentient Puddle
I actually have a dozen bottles of beer in one of the drawers in my cube. But I can’t crack them until later, so I may just have to take a rain check on this.
But then again, seeing as “innovation” is a drink, I probably should just skip it altogether out of fear of liver failure.
JGabriel
Napoleon:
McArdle doesn’t even work for WaPo, though she does work for The Atlantic, whose publisher defended the same type of pay-for-play salons WaPo got caught organizing earlier this year.
So maybe they’re wooing McArdle for the pay-for-play salon experience she would bring?
.
gizmo
re McArdle:
I’d like to see a list of libertarian accomplishments over the years. Roads and bridges? Healthcare improvements? Environmental protection? Schools built?
What exactly is their value to society? As far as I can tell, they remain perched in an ivory tower, gin + tonic in hand, looking with disdain over all those unfortunates who toil beneath them.
jibeaux
How can we get Ezra Klein to pop in to the chat and say, “that’s like, your journey, man”?
Gus
How did this shallow woman of average(?) intelligence become such a mover and shaker in the world of journalism? Who gives a shit what she thinks?
SpotWeld
Isn’t the whole act of becoming a poltical advocate for anything pretty much an antethesis to Galtian behavior?
Sentient Puddle
…and she just brought up death panels, even before (by my count) any of the other drinking words.
Had a good run.
Brendan
I submitted one in response he her assertion that Health care insurers are especially profitable.
It probably won’t get in because I also asked who they had to deny caqre to in order to make that profit
cleek
i do not care in the slightest what McArdle has to say, about anything. ever.
tc125231
@cleek: Right. I long ago decided not to raise my blood pressure listening to a gerbil masquerading as an economist.
BDeevDad
So it’s the black people’s fault. I can’t believe she went there.
SpotWeld
@BDeevDad: She knows there’s black people in other countries too.. right?
arguingwithsignposts
When you ask McArgle-Bargle to cite her statistics on any of the ideas she spouts, her invariable answer is “look it up” or “Google it.” Because bloggers don’t have to provide links to their source material.
wanker.
BDeevDad
@SpotWeld: Obviously not
Ann B. Nonymous
Ugh. Seeing the phrases “pay-for-play” and “Megan McArdle” so close together is triggering a migraine from the unwanted associations. Don’t like it.
(I am sure MMcA and PS have a perfectly fine and hygienic romantic life. Honi soit qui mal y pense.)
arguingwithsignposts
@Gus:
As noted in a previous thread, the entire village is a circle-jerk of shameless nepotism. The blogging end of things has degenerated to that level in less than a decade of existence. Drum, Klein, Yglesias, and the others link to McArgle-Bargle, and she links back.
It’s a broderfest in some ways.
Anne Laurie
@Ulysses (not yet home):
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second time as farce.”
shelley matheis
Re: Drinking game.
Don’t forget ‘tort reform.’
DougJ
I can’t believe she went there.
I knew it was coming but I couldn’t think of the right phrase to add to the list.
Lyle4
What I really don’t understand is…insurance companies can already decide to give or withhold care. People every damn day decide to go without getting the care they need.
How the hell is it better the way we’re already doing it?
Sentient Puddle
Facepalm.
Seriously, WTF?
Slugger
There are certain people that it is best to ignore than refute. One of my criteria for getting that status is someone who continually supports the Republican agenda status quo under the guise of being “libertarian” or Hayekian or free-market oriented. In actual fact, their position is to support the currently empowered elites.
This thread reminds me of one of these people; I don’t like using their names.
SpotWeld
SpotWeld
Sorry, block quote error, meant to post:
“You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I have a workable political program. I’m a libertarian. “
Mark S.
Megan, why does the US spend twice as much as most other countries on health care?
All right, I got a raise! I’m going to spend it on heart surgery!
DougJ
Seriously, WTF?
Yeah, I liked that too.
Rob
“Health care is a superior good: as we get richer, we want more of it. So it makes sense that America, which is richer than most other countries, also spends more.”
I want more health problems (and therefore health care costs) because I’m richer? Is this woman sane?
Sloth
Seriously, WTF?
This is the only sane reaction to Megan McArdle. Well, the second one. The first should be to cancel your Atlantic Subscription.
PeakVT
Megan McArdle: It wasn’t a statistic—it was a hypothetical.
So, what she writes is technically untrue AND collectively nonsense.
Good to know.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
“If you admit that resources are limited, and you advocate spending more of them on keeping old people alive, doesn’t that mean you’re advocating killing young people off sooner?”
ricky
If the quality of the health care debate gets you down, check out this tribute to Senator Kennedy featuring news coverage of the issue from 1971 to 1974. The only thing that has changed is the incresing cost of health coverage and the declining quality of news coverage.
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/health-care/video-ted-kennedy-fighting-for-national-health-insurance-nearly-three-decades-ago/
EthylEster
@cleek: i do not care in the slightest what McArdle has to say, about anything. ever.
Well, I do enjoy hearing about her latest idiocy. But I depend on others to wade through the BS and find noteworthy turds. Her ignorance of current health insurance rates elicited a chortle as did her admission last fall that she wouldn’t be voting in the 2008 election because she forgot to register.
She’s refreshingly frank about her own stupidity but I doubt she realizes that.
Quicksand
Ow, my head.
Of course the VA booklet is “biased towards choosing to pull the plug.” The default option, without the booklet, is “keep me alive no matter what.” If that’s all the publication talked about, it wouldn’t be very helpful, would it?
Sentient Puddle
@SpotWeld: Yeah, I did another facepalm at that too. I mean, if you’re just going to throw your arms in the air and declare your ideas to be deeply unpopular without making any effort to, y’know, persuade people and make the ideas popular, then why the fuck are you writing about them in the first place?
Eric U.
I raised the point in the second update here recently. I always thought the end of life counseling == death panel canard was true but too much of a stretch. This is because any health insurance has to have limits decided by some kind of a board. You don’t want to be financing million dollar treatments that extend life by a day. Thus calling the IMAC board a death panel is the perfect republican lie because it has an element of truth to it that makes it hard to argue against when the opponent in the argument has little intelligence or desire to understand the truth.
JGabriel
Sigh. It’s called poverty, Megan.
And, yes, we know that you don’t understand it.
.
Alan in SF
If you look at Britain’s NICE, they use something called “quality adjusted life years” to decide whether treatment should be given or withheld. That means that the system is biased against treating old people and very sick people.
If by “treatment” you mean “an organ transplant that would otherwise go to a younger, healthier person.
Megan is always intellectually honest, so I’m sure she’s arguing here that old people and very sick people should have first priority for scarce organ transplants. It must therefore be true that the current system, unObamafied, does in fact allocate scarce organ transplants as Megan prefers, rather than the cruel British way.
Nazgul35
How much treatment do old people and very sick people without health care coverage get right now?
khead
I enjoyed the two exchanges with the person from Philly. Especially the last paragraph in the first exchange where she appears to respond to the beat down she received a few weeks ago.
She sounds like my uncle-in-law. He sat across from me – I’m a govt employee, BTW – at a picnic a few weeks ago and declared that “Government has never, ever, created a job”.
I wonder just what the hell he thinks I’ve been doing the last 10 years.
BDeevDad
@Alan in SF: She’s “libertarian” so she actually wants to give it to the highest bidder. Though that usually means the elderly over the young.
NYT
“Anonymous: You said that medical innovation will be wiped out if we have a type of national health care, because European drug companies get 80% of their revenue from Americans. Where did you get this statistic?
Megan McArdle: It wasn’t a statistic–it was a hypothetical.
However, whenever I have been able to find pharma financial statements that break down their profits by region, the lion’s share always comes from the US. ”
Here are some actual sales breakdowns by US/Non-US :
Pfizer 42/58
Schering 30/70
GSK 44/56
Sanofi 31/69
Eli-Lilly 54/46
Wyeth >50% outside US
Merck – couldn’t find in the five minutes I used
Incidentally, you can guarantee that McMegan will be greatly concerned about the devastating impact that healthcare reforms could have on pharma research but will not have one word to say about the imminent gutting of Wyeth’s and Schering Plough’s research shops when they merge with Pfizer and Merck.
Brain Hertz
This is yet another of the despicable lies being endlessly touted in the media without challenge.
What is being referred to here is the process by which treatments or drugs are added to the approved list in the UK. Do you think that insurance companies in the US don’t have approved lists for treatments or drugs? Or do you think that part is completely open ended?
There is no process by which the NHS (or any other body) in the UK applies some test as to whether to “withhold treatment” from particular patients. It just doesn’t exist, but many commentators are frequently trying to suggest that such a thing is the way things work in Europe.
Justin
You have to love McGalt’s use of QALY’s. I’m sure she did so in order to confuse/impress her mouthbreathing followers. Of course, if she actually knew anything about economics (especially cost-benefit analysis), then she’d have no problem whatsoever with the use of QALYs to determine efficient allocation of health care resources. Then again, MM’s exposure to economics is limited to Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.
Brian J
Oh, the stupid. It burns, it burns so badly.
There’s a world of difference between the conservative idea of a death panel and end of life counseling, sort of like the difference between the truth and a lie. I can’t say that I know anything what goes on at the V.A. or in Britain, but unless there’s a board that decides whether you live or die, there’s nothing remotely plausible about what these idiots are saying.
Brain Hertz
fixed…
Wile E. Quixote
@rapido
Ur doin it rong. You need to apply the hammer to someone else’s forehead, say, a teabagger or birther’s forehead. Really, try it my way for an evening, I promise you you’ll be hooked and never go back.