Krugman finds various commentators ably demolishing the arguments in Bobo’s pro-voucher piece this morning. That’s great. One should remember, however, that Bobo is not — not anywhere, but especially not here — interested in presenting real arguments, he’s interested in catapulting the propaganda. He uses the phrase “premium support” and pushes the bogus Medicare Part D comparison. He doesn’t delve too deeply into anything, sticking to quick, faux high-brow, totebagger-friendly anecdotes about the power of the free market. If Paul Krugman stops him and starts sticking his big snout in the column, the subterfuge won’t last, but at a glance the arguments will appear to be sound.
I think Bobo is making a mistake here. All discussion of vouchercare hurts Republicans. Producing conservative flim-flam about the awesomeness of vouchercare may get a few Charlie Rose viewers to nod along, but it also produces…more discussion of vouchercare. And that’s bad for the conservative movement.
Bobo should lay low, produce a few columns about what some Assistant Professor of Psychology thinks about dick tweets and so on. But he can’t — conservatives are drawn to vouchercare like moths to a flame.
Valdivia
I love the Krugman post–pretty much making Bobo sound as stupid as he is, for all to read. FTW!
cat48
I can’t wait for TPaw’s great fix for SocSec! Hope it’s as awesome as Vouchercare. Maybe BoBo will also write about that next time. Can’t wait!
moops
@cat48:
Do you even need to have a TP plan to write a Bobo column about it ? We could write Bobo’s column for him today if we wanted to.
Turgidson
It seems to be the case that they honestly, genuinely believe that they’re right about Paul Rand Ryan’s plan, that the people will come to realize its awesomeness, and all they need to do is explain it more and better (read: lie about what it actually is with phrases like “premium support” and “saving Medicare”).
I hope they continue to believe this until at least November 2012.
The GOP Medicare plan: stolen straight out of General Westmoreland’s greatest hits. What morans.
Rhoda
God Bless them, they’re going for the Social Security trust fund now too. They can’t quit the chance to get at all that money for Wall Street. Hopefully, they’ll take a vote on this too and the Republican nominees will all be asked about it at the debate coming up (Romney will be there) and they’ll fly into the flame and burn up their hopes for 2012.
I shouldn’t have had the wine at lunch, I’m sleepy and day dreaming and I have to be here for another two hours.
arguingwithsignposts
A while back, someone suggested a Bobo Column Writing Contest to see who could produce the closest approximation of his word salad. I think that’s a good idea, sorta like pundit karaoke. We could vote on the winner.
Also, I’d really like to see Bobo and Kthuhlu line up one of those weekly chats like Collins and Bobo do. That would be awesome covered in awesome sauce.
trollhattan
@ InstaDoug
Thank goodness, I thought you might have farmed out your Bobo-kickin’ to Scott Lemieux.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/06/bobos-unempirical-world
Yes, keep this meme in play by “whatever means necessary.”
Ash Can
Bobo can’t help himself. A new GOP plan to shaft the poor and middle class comes along and he can’t let it go. Now, as Rhoda points out @ #5, with the GOP revisiting SS privatization, his head is going to explode. But he’ll die happy.
D. Mason
Not just vouchercare, vouchucation too. They seem to love all things voucher… maybe they just like the word, it is kind of fun to say it.
jeffreyw
Oliver is seeking a voucher for gruel.
MattR
In the category of “facts that just cannot be correct” – From the Ezra Klein post that Krugman links to
(as a percentage of GDP)
Culture of Truth
Well, if that’s true, that’s to their credit, since one is a largely uninteresting pseudo-scandal, and the other is a genuinely important substantive topic of discussion.
Suggesting many of these conservatives are true Ayn Randian believers who mean what they say.
JCT
I made the mistake of starting to read his dreck this AM – stopped the minute I hit “premium support” (without the quotes, natch).
What a useless twit.
And once more with feeling “VoucherCare!” It will cure what ails you or leave you dead, the Republicans and their Galtian overlords will be thrilled either way.
BGinCHI
Good advice for Bobo: prey on the pre-tenured.
MattR
@JCT:
Slight addition to make it more accurate.
Just Some Fuckhead
If tax cuts and deregulation won’t fix what ails ya, all that’s left is vouchers. All of you idiots that keep slamming vouchers, please step up and tell me how tax cuts or deregulation will work.
BGinCHI
“Premium support” reminds me of the woman who shows up at Bill Murray’s door in “Lost in Translation” who has been paid to offer him “premium fantasy.”
Lip my stockings. Lip them!
Martin
@D. Mason: Coupons. Old people love coupons. It makes them feel like they’re beating the system.
Librarian
Has Krugman ever criticized anything Bobo has ever written? I think there’s an unwritten rule at the Times: “Thou shalt not attack thy fellow Times columnists.”
Cris (without an H)
DAVID BROOKS OUT OF MY PUBLIC BROADCASTING
srsly, he is a bruise on both PBS and NPR
James E. Powell
The phrase “premium support” needs to be explained more fully. Do seniors need help paying the current Medicare premiums? To whom are current Medicare premiums paid? To whom would they paid under Ryan’s plan? Why does Ryan want to pay premiums to these companies? Will it be better to pay the premiums to them than to Medicare, as it is now? Why?
Cris (without an H)
The first comment on the Krugman post is worth the price of admission:
Sasha
@MattR:
Combined?!?!
Whiskey Screams from a Guy With No Short-Term Memory
Conservatives are victims of their own language here. Ryan made a lethal mistake in referring to the Medicare disbursements as “vouchers”, because everyone knows that “vouchers” are what you give poor black and brown kids to pretend that they have some kind of school choice, but in reality, since the parents have no extra money for the GOOD schools, you’re just shuffling them off into a burned out hulk of a ghetto school with drunk teachers, broken windows, and daily after-school gunfights – while the white kids go off to shiny, new, wonderful, segregated schools.
The old white folks that might otherwise be protesting in their wheeled scooters, with poorly lettered signs, for Ryan’s plan realized that THEY were going to be the recipients of vouchers, and that was the fucking end of the Ryan plan right there. Just keep on referring to it as “Vouchercare” and making sure that any discussion of the Ryan plan refers to “vouchers”, and it won’t pull ten votes in the Senate.
shortstop
Love this.
bemused
@Rhoda:
I think I’ll call my brand new Rep Chip tomorrow and see if the staffer can tell me how Chip will tell his senior citizen constituents this is as terrific a plan as Ryan’s Medicare clunker.
shortstop
@BGinCHI: Oh, no! Oh, my god! Oh, no! (rolling on floor and kicking feet)
El Cid
I do not like the term “Vouchercare”, because it suggests there’s still “care”.
Also, if this “plan” were to be implemented, shortly thereafter there would be no vouchers, either.
shortstop
@El Cid: I agree. “Voucherfuckinginsultourintelligencescam” has a nice ring.
jl
“Consumer directed/driven health care’ is used to mean so many things that it doesn’t mean anything, really.
It has been used to describe health care market reforms that help patients make more informed decisions about their care, to proposals to crudely and bluntly increase out of pocket expenditures to force patients to have ‘more skin in the game’ and use less care (and by the always wonderful and unquestionable first assumptions of economics, always make ‘the best’ decision).
When ‘consumer driven health care’ is used to describe policies to force more out of pocket expenditures, I think there is good evidence that such policies can kill people if they are chronically ill and poor.
There is only one randomized controlled experiment in the US that looks at expenditures and health coutomes from different insurance policies with different benefit schemes.
The principal investigator for the project, Joseph Newhouse, recently wrote an article on the implications of his experiment for consumer driven health care. Below is a quote from the article, followed by a link.
Consumer-Directed Health Plans And The RAND Health Insurance Experiment
Joseph P. Newhouse
Health Affairs, 23, no. 6 (2004): 107-113
…For most people enrolled in the RAND experiment, who were typical of Americans covered by employment-based insurance, the variation in use across the plans appeared to have minimal to no effects on health status. By contrast, for those who were both poor and sick—people who might be found among those covered by Medicaid or lacking insurance—the reduction in use was harmful, on average. In particular, hypertension was less well controlled among that group, sufficiently so that the annual likelihood of death in that group rose approximately 10 percent. This adverse effect occurred in spite of the reduced cost sharing for low-income families, a feature generally not found in today’s plans.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/23/6/107.long
There is a general problem with health care programs that try to reduce costs by forcing patients to have ‘more skin in the game’ (or pay high deductibles, or force them to direct their own care on the fly through rationing by ability to pay over the short run) for people with chronic illnesses that do not produce any symptoms in the short run, but cause irreversible harm in the long run.
Examples are high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol or triglycerides, obesity, lack of physical exercise, high blood sugar, early stages of diabetes. There is no signal given to the patient to help them determine how much it is worth to spend money now to gather information, and take corrective action, while at the same time, the conditions is causing serious and irreversible harm.
Newhouse is coauthor of a recent article that investigates the problems in fine tuning the ‘more skin in the game’ approach to weeding out excess utilization, and preserve access to care for serious chronic conditions that produce no signs or symptions in the early stages but are still doing serious and irreversible harm to the patient.
High-deductible health insurance plans: efforts to sharpen a blunt instrument.
Reed M, Fung V, Price M, Brand R, Benedetti N, Derose SF, Newhouse JP, Hsu J.
Health Aff (Millwood). 2009 Jul-Aug;28(4):1145-54.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/28/4/1145.long
BTW, Health Affairs is a very good journal on research and developments in health care systems, which tries to publish articles that the average person can read. I think it is an open access journal.
Brachiator
@MattR:
I’m in a cranky mood today, because I had someone at work foolishly challenging my numbers on some stuff. They wuz wrong.
So basic mistakes annoy me. Big time.
Klein is surprisingly sloppy here. To say “our government spends” makes no sense. He meant to say, and the Kaiser report clearly says, the United States as a nation spends more on health care than other countries, not the United States government.
jl
BTW, I don’t have a link, but I saw a quote by Ryan that the ‘more skin in the game’ logic lies behind his Medicare proposal. As I remember, he said that the fixed value of vouchers would effectively cap total government expenditures available for care. The patient would only have so much money to buy insurance, and therefore the insurance policies would have to be stingier on benefits. That would encourage Medicare enrollees to bid down the high costs of US health care.
Anyone else remember that? I think I saw it in an internet clip of an interview.
Anyway, if you have a chronic illness that produces no symptoms now, but can produce long term serious irreversible damage, and you have limited means (like for example, living on fixed income, or from savings) that bidding process can kill you prematurely. There is evidence from a randomized experiment.
david mizner
Bobo doesn’t care about the conservative movement any more than he cares about the progressive movement. He wants both to cede government to technocratic neoliberals, “liberal” Republicans, and “pragamatic” conservatives who’ll gather at the Monocle or whatever and over drinks and an amiable dinner design a center-right utopia.
BGinCHI
@shortstop: No Bob Harris, no!
ppcli
The core of the current Republican party are people who have not forgotten Reagan’s anti-Medicare speech on vinyl, and they (and their intellectual descendants) have been biding their time since Medicare was passed waiting for the moment to overturn it. But they seemed to be aware that they needed to be patient: chip away, run up a huge debt so they could claim that the debt was the issue, keep repeating specious slogans for decades to plant framing ideas in people’s heads: (“worthless IOUs”, “nobody young today believes it will be there when they retire”, “it’s broke”, etc.), and generally doing the slow, relentless political grind that the Republicans have perfected. The whole point is to preserve plausible deniability until the target is actually annihilated.
But it seems as if once the Ryan plan was released, the Republicans figured that they had blown their cover. They couldn’t pretend to be the saviors of Medicare as they had in 2010. No turning back. So they’re pulling out all the stops. Mask has fallen.
shortstop
@BGinCHI: So classic. Gets me every time.
harokin
@Brachiator: He meant exactly what he said. It is in exhibit 9 to the Kaiser report he linked to. He was not being sloppy.
BC
What bothers me most about Bobo’s column is the assumption he makes that liberals just wanted the government to do something, so they concocted a scheme to put government in charge of health care for those 65 years old and older. What is lost is the history we had in the 1950s and 1960s of seniors being unable to get any insurance and unable to pay medical bills – doctors stopped taking chickens for office visits and people in urban settings no longer raised chickens anyway. Medicare was set up in response to a very real problem and has, for the most part, done a remarkable job in solving that problem.
Another thing in Bobo’s column that sets me on edge is his use of 1967 predictions of costs without stating that the hyperinflation of the 1970s was stripped out.
Really, what is $12B 1967 value in 1990? I think it would be more like $90B, but that wouldn’t make Brooks’ case, so we are left with 1967 dollars compared to 1990 dollars.
harlana
Fabulous. Republicans have handed the term “vouchercare” over to Dems on a silver platter. This word should be on the lips of every lone Democrat on every Sunday morning panel, ad nauseum.
BGinCHI
@harlana: My guess is that “weiner” will be on their lips.
El Cid
@jl: OK, but is it not true that lowered rates of treatment, particularly in early diagnosis & treatment, could save money if it led to earlier mortality?
Really, now, this is a budget crisis we’re talking about — our debt is a life or death issue!
Brachiator
@harokin:
Nope. Sorry. Explanatory detail for Exhibit 9
Italics are mine. Total national spending on health care and public spending on health care are two separate things.
Please, Balloon Juicers, don’t go Sarah Palin on me.
ciotog
My favorite part of Brooks’ column was the end: his gargantuan claim that “top-down control” has never worked, ever, in human history. Apparently the Army didn’t pull off D-Day, that was liberal propaganda. Damn Roosevelt.
jl
@El Cid:
“but is it not true that lowered rates of treatment, particularly in early diagnosis & treatment, could save money if it led to earlier mortality?”
Thanks for the pro tip. QED, problem solved :)!
But, health care professionals, and even health economists do not take that approach.
And just to get serious for a moment, it is not even good economic analysis in terms of human welfare, since one of the problems is that is costs significant bucks to even get enough information to make an informed choice about care. So standard economic theory doesn’t apply, which always has some kind of perfect information assumption.
But, yeah, you are right, the government might save a few bucks. But know one really knows, since for example, if you are an untreated diabetic and have a diabetic crisis and somehow get to the emergency department before you are dead, then they have to treat you (and sometimes this leads to a hospital admission). Then they are supposed to quit treating you as soon as it the condition does not threaten irreparable harm. Then you get to go home and get not treated for diabetes again because you don’t have to bucks. Then, if you somehow get to the ER the next time you get in trouble, the process repeats itself.
eemom
what would it take to permanently wipe the smug smirk off Brooks’s mug? Someone tell me and I’ll do it.
Cris (without an H)
(Also,) too late
Cascio
@Brachiator, look at the graphic at Exhibit 9 again. As Krugman says, the US public expenditure as percentage of GDP is higher than in the UK, Canada, Switzerland, etc.
It’s lower than in the Netherlands, Germany, and France, but Krugman didn’t mention them.
Bulworth
Vouchercare is awesome. Spread the word.
Valdivia
and Radar just released a whole thread of texts between Wiener and some woman in Vegas. ugh. embarrassing.
I have to say at least the Sanford emails were like pieces of a bodice-ripper novel, this, um not even close.
trollhattan
@eemom:
I’d say pee on his loafers, but that would be impolite. Better to Madoff his 401k.
eemom
@Valdivia:
also, Kornacki over at Salon is airing some old un-sex-related Weiner, um, dirty laundry. Saying that he got his start in politics by using race-baiting to win a local election back in the days of the Crown Heights riots.
El Cid
@jl:
Yes, but the problem here is the availability of ER services, the requirement that you must be treated, and not letting ER have the same ability as insurance companies do of not covering pre-existing conditions.
You have to learn how to think outside the casket.
Berial
@Brachiator: He probably should have worded it better, but from exhibit 10 of the Kaiser page the percentage of GDP spent by the public sector of the US is 7.4% which is a higher percentage of GDP than all those other countries listed. Though in some cases not by much.
Of course, if the US GDP is higher than those other countries that would imply that the US Government is paying more than those countries as well.
BGinCHI
@El Cid:
For the win.
Dems ought to pay you for that one.
jl
@El Cid: OK, you win. We need to start closing down emergency rooms faster.
You should apply to the a policy analysis job with the GOP or one of their think tanks. You got the right stuff for that, Mr. Cid.
I hear a big job for social security reform is coming up very soon. Early bird catches the worm!
scav
Thinking outside the casket, as suggested, maybe we can kill two problems with one free-market magic spell? When you’re incurably ill and tired of life, give all your money to Wall Street, become poor, uninsured and instantly lack access to medical care and thus a drag on society that can be trimmed in all good conscience!
Larv
@Brachiator:
Yes, and the countries Ezra listed are all the ones whose public healthcare spending is below that average (the ones to the left of the US in the chart you linked). Ezra’s point is that our public spending is already about that of countries with nationalized health care, before we even consider private expenditures. What exactly are you objecting to?
jl
@scav:
Another budding GOP policy analyst! Probably to be effective program on a large scale, you would need a way for Wall Street to just take the money, based on some excuse or fine print.
That would not be assisted suicide, because Wall Street gets the money. Don’t even need an informed consent process.
El Cid, you have some competition.
harokin
@Berial: He listed the countries whose spending per GDP was less than the U.S. He could have gone on to list those countries (Germany, France, Sweden), where spending per GDP was more, but why? His point is an increased public role does not automatically lead to increased public costs. Politically, it should be useful to point out US public spending on health care exceeds Canadian public spending, with the same, or worse outcomes.
Steve
@Brachiator: You need to look at Exhibit 9 again. It shows public health expenditures, not total health expenditures, and our public expenditures are higher than the public expenditures of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada and Switzerland, just like Klein said.
Of course, our total health expenditures, including both public and private, are way way above every other country, including the ones I just listed and all the other countries too. We all know that, however. The reason this is a man-bites-dog story is that you wouldn’t expect our government to spend a bigger share of GDP on health care than countries like Japan, Canada and the UK, considering their public health care systems cover the whole population and ours mostly don’t.
Valdivia
@eemom:
lovely I guess the sharks are out.
I guess that what shocks me is how devoid of artful flirtation these texts are–he just went straight for the sex thing, no holds barred. As someone who respects people who know how to actually flirt I must say these sort of show a very banal man.
jl
@Steve:
“Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada and Switzerland”
And all of those countries have higher life expectancies than the US, at birth, 40, 60 and 65, for both men and women.
Edit: which is an attempt to prove that public spending on health is bad since the US does more of it than other countries (snark), or a slightly off topic comment spreading the word the health outcomes, on average, in the US are NOT good compared to other countries for people of any age and either sex.
Linda Featheringill
@James E. Powell:
Medicare comes in Part A, Part B, and Part D. Part A is major medical, Part D is medications, and Part B is everything else.
I pay Medicare about 95/month for Part A. Medicare waives my Part D premiums because I’m so goshdarn cute. Medicaid pays for my Part B premiums, again because I’m so goshdarn cute.
Help is available. Whether it’s enough help is another question.
Amir_Khalid
@Librarian:
He has, especially in the past few weeks, in relation to the Ryan plan: Bobo, because Bobo supports it; and Joe Nocera, because Nocera gave Ryan credit for trying to start a serious debate with a plan that is heartless in its approach and nonsensical in its substance.
The first time Krugman zinged him over this, Bobo got all huffy in his next column and called Krugman a “blowhard”. Not that Kthug is fazed; he has just zinged Bobo again in his blog.
OzoneR
@harlana:
what lone Democrat?
Villago Delenda Est
@El Cid:
Only when a Democrat is in the White House. When it’s a Rethug occupying it, the deficit isn’t important, and the national debt isn’t important.
jwb
@Amir_Khalid: Krugman’s readership is also much larger than Bobo’s despite all the TV Bobo does. Krugman’s column also runs reasonably often in my local paper, Bobo’s only rarely. And you can tell by the way that Bobo snipes that he knows he is intellectually overmatched.
scav
@Valdivia: mmm, I don’t know how much luck you’re going to be having looking among the political and powerful classes. Bunga-Bunga Berlisconi? Hot Rabbit DSK? Aphrodisiacal Kissinger? Wide-Stance Craig? Smoking Clinton? Diaper Vitter? The Prince of Wales was even stranger than that last. Odd, simply littered about the landscape — artful is surprisingly lacking. Jury is out on banal as I haven’t the evidence: the sort I hang out with don’t go out of their way to share their banalities.
Valdivia
@scav:
yeah I guess you’re right. Neruda they ain’t ;)
Brachiator
@Berial:
I think the implication of the data is that the universal health care plans of developed nations permit private health care expenditures to be reined in while still maintaining excellent levels of care via public spending. Public care spending in the nations shown are roughly the same, but in the US private care spending and total national spending are much higher.
No, it doesn’t imply that at all. This is also the point of the per capita and other comparisons, to adjust for the relative sizes of national economies. Otherwise, the analysis would be a waste of time.
@Larv:
Klein’s statement that US government healthcare spending was higher than that of other countries was both wrong and sloppy.
Klein is generally good, so there is no excuse for sloppiness here, nor any excuse for posters to try to clean his stuff up. The bottom line is that you have to go to the detail to get a clearer picture of what he is talking about. This makes the Internets rule, but is sloppy journalism on Kelin’s part.
JCT
@jwb:
I’m sorry, Bobo has been “writing” such drivel of late, he’d be intellectually overmatched by my beagle.
As I often joke, I’m nearly in hock paying for my kid’s education at the University of Chicago and this obtuse, disingenuous fuckwit alum is devaluing the whole place at this point.
AnotherBruce
@Brachiator: What part of public expenditure do you not understand? You’re the one who is being sloppy, or perhaps just stubborn here.
@Steve: in comment #60 lays it out about as simply as it can be layed out. If you can’t understand that then I don’t know what to tell you.
Berial
@Brachiator:
I’m sorry but I just don’t get it.
Exhibit 10 specifically is comparing ‘public’ and ‘private’ expenditures. Public = US Government. US Public = 7.4% > those countries listed; how is he wrong when he says “US government healthcare spending was higher than that of the countries listed”?
I agree that US healthcare spending is way to high. I agree that single payer looks good when using the Kaiser data. I am not arguing about any of that. I just don’t follow your complaint. What is wrong and sloppy about US Government spending being higher than the countries he listed?
jl
I don’t have time to check through whether what Klein did was right, or if he gave poor explanation for his conclusion.
But OECD Health Statistics comes to rescue.
http://www.oecd.org/document/30/0,3343,en_2649_34631_12968734_1_1_1_37407,00.html
on the free excel data download, on the tab ‘Public exp., per capita US$ PPP’ you have per capita health care expenditure from public sources for each year in US dollars, currency conversions using purchasing power parity.
In 2006 (I picked that because most recent year with complete data, except Belgium and Netherlands still missing) only Luxembourg and Norway had higher health care expenditure per capita than that US from public sources. The rest of the OECD countries had lower per capita expenditure from public sources.
jwb
@JCT: Maybe he’s a mole under deep cover instructed to pump the most idiotic of GOP ideas.
Brachiator
@Cascio:
Work with me people.
I didn’t criticize Krugman. I criticized Klein. And more accurately, I am criticizing the caption (probably not written by Klein) that states “the US government spends more on health care than governments where health care is fully or mostly socialized.” Note that on it’s face this statement suggests that US government spending is higher than the public spending of any other country with nationalized health care. It is not. Pure and simple.
It does not negate Klein’s larger points, but it causes unnecessary confusion, as is evidenced even by other posts in this thread. It’s almost funny to see people jumping from Exhibit to Exhibit in the Kaiser report to try to justify editorial sloppiness.
This statement is clearly wrong. It is not the end of the world, but I expect better than this from what is supposed to be world class journalists.
JCT
@jwb: I guess everyone has to be good at SOMETHING.
MattR
@Brachiator: I am thoroughly confused by what you are objecting to. Looking at the data in exhibit 10 of the Kaiser report, let’s list out a few countries
Canada – public (7.3%) + private (3.1%) = 10.4%
UK – public (7.2%) + private (1.5%) = 8.7%
Japan – public (6.6%) + private (1.5%) = 8.1%
Swiss – public (6.3%) + private (4.4%) = 10.7%
US – public (7.4%) + private (8.5%) = 15.9%
Of these five countries listed, if you look at just the public (ie government) expenditures, the United States is still at the top of the list.
Villago Delenda Est
@Steve:
I think you can lay this to the fact that in other countries, health is more of a public work, a utility, a social good.
In this country, it’s a profit center, and that includes Medicare/Medicaid expenditures for it.
Profit is more important than people in every possible case.
Larv
@Brachiator:
Okay, let me see if I understand you. Your complaint doesn’t seem to be with the factual accuracy of the phrase MattR initially quoted, “Our government spends more on health care than the governments of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada or Switzerland” (from the caption to the graphic in Klein’s post) so much as the combination of that caption with the heading of the same graphic; “U.S. leads world in health care spending”. Do I have that right?
Tim Connor
Bobo is coin operated. Put a quarter in his arse, and press a button, and listen to his cute enunciations!
End of discussion.
Steve
@Brachiator: My friend, Klein’s statement is 100% factually correct. He said “Our government spends more on health care than the governments of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada or Switzerland.” That is the precise statement you criticized, that you still maintain is “clearly wrong.”
Our government spends more on health care that the government of Japan spends on health care. See Kaiser Exhibit 9.
Our government spends more on health care than the government of Australia spends on health care. See Kaiser Exhibit 9.
Our government spends more on health care than the government of Norway spends on health care. See Kaiser Exhibit 9.
And so on for each and every one of the countries he listed. You seem to be wishing he had made a different point, but (1) his statement is true regardless; and (2) you wouldn’t seek to minimize his point if you understood why it’s a powerful point.
slightly_peeved
@Brachiator:
I think Inigo Montoya needs to have a chat with you about what the words ‘in line’ mean. If the public expenditures are in line with other countries, then some other countries will probably have lower public expenditures and some higher. France and Germany have higher public expenditure, the UK and Australia have lower.
The fact that US public health expenditure is in line with other countries that use single-payer (or single-provider, in the case of the UK) is an indictment of it.
grandpajohn
@Amir_Khalid:
Along with being a serial liar asshole it appears that bobo is also lacking in self awareness
iPirate
Like moths to a flame?
Interestingly, some recent studies support that moths are not in fact drawn to, or attracted by lights, including flames.
They end up at the flame due to confusion caused in their hard-wired-by-evolution navigation systems (think sextant) by human lights and fires (which are not fixed, distant objects in the sky).
I kind of like them ending up there by confusion even better. Suits Bobo well, anyway.
rickstersherpa
James Kwak at Baseline Scenario points out that Brooks’ essential dishonesty throughout this whole column. http://baselinescenario.com/2011/06/07/when-you-dont-need-to-worry-about-facts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BaselineScenario+%28The+Baseline+Scenario%29
The Times have a rule where its columnists cannot directly challenge what the another Timesman has written, so Brooks and Krugman have to dance this dance with each other.
Brooks, and the conservative movement, really do want to move the U.S. into an imperial role with a feudal republic, a Government of, by, and for that upper 1%. He thinks this is the correct natural order. To him working class and middle class dying during or shortly after the end of thei productive working lives is a feature, not a defect.