Healthcare: The Defeat of a Common Enemy

(Revised from a reply on Ian Welsh's blog. Ian Welsh is a prominent progressive blogger who objects to progressives rejoicing at the passage of a deeply-flawed health care plan.)

I think the progressive blogosphere and congresspeople are rejoicing in the defeat of an enemy

Yet that defeat is also a defeat of progressives. Fighting among ourselves will only make the defeat worse. One thing that wasn’t clear to any of us last August is just how bad a defeat for the Democrats would have been: it very likely would have put the radical right back in power. So I think standing on principle is both ill-mannered and poor tactics. Sure, we can blast the Congressional progressives for not keeping their promises. We might even be able to get some of them replaced. But would this strengthen our position? It would not. Long term, I think, conditions have rarely been better for major reforms and perhaps the formation of a new major party in the USA, and that is where we need to focus our efforts.

Croak of the Day: We Have An Early Winner

John Holbo, satirizing Jonah Goldberg:

The Liberal Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the superconducting super collider of culture-war melting pot calling the kettle black!

Croak of the Day: Brad Delong

To Brad Delong, on Mitt Romney repudiating a national health care plan very similar to the one he supported in Massachusetts:

I did not know that you could have a circular firing squad made up of only one person.

Honorable mention to Michael Bérubé's satire of the radical-right response to the health care plan, "The Night the Country Died:"

In the deep of a Sunday night
In the land of the health care bill
When the free republic died
And they talk about it still

On Tea Party anti-taxism

Mark Thoma (Economist's View) quoting a remarkably wrong Bruce Bartlett article:

the Tea Party crowd appears to believe that federal taxes are very considerably higher than they actually are […] it's hard to explain this divergence between perception and reality.

Me, croaking in comments, paraphrased: the Tea Partiers haven't decided taxes are "too high" because they believe erroneous data; they have decided to choose erroneous data because they believe their taxes are too high. Unfortunately, as Converse found nearly 50 years ago, this is not an area where reason rules.

[edited on the day of publication for clarity]

Croak of the Day: Simon Johnson

"They Saved the Big Banks But Kind Of Lost The Economy Doing It"--Simon Johnson at Baseline Scenario.

(Yesterday, really.)  Read the rest.

Belated Croak of the Day

To "Bond Girl" at Self-Evident, on the Greek financial disaster and Goldman-Sachs's participation:

To structure deals like this, one would have to be a complete sociopath.

Read the whole thing.

Think of the Thirty Million, Part II

Except that, it's not 30 million who will get needed health care--it's 30 million who will be required to buy insurance, much of which will probably not be useful. A lot of those will be younger people who will never use the insurance, and some will undoubtedly be bankrupted by the mandates. Sounds like an electoral loser to me.

That's the populist argument. The policy argument goes like this: the cost controls in the Senate plan are hopelessly inadequate. There is little regulation and no public option (itself a form of regulation.) Which means that US health care costs, already high and rising, will continue to rise and, at the end, when the system costs too much to sustain, the main difference between the Senate plan and doing nothing will be that a lot more money has been funneled to the health insurance branch of the financial services industry, some more has been funneled to Big Pharma, and perhaps a few more people have gotten care: the exponential rise in costs will swamp the additional money fed into the system by the mandates.

Perhaps, perhaps. I would like to hope for something better. I don't think the rising costs are quite as terrible as most economists: eventually, people will decide how much care to spend for. I have my doubts that the continued expansion in end-of-life care costs will continue. (This could all be upended by a real life extension technology, but that seems unlikely.) But unless something more effective at cost control than the Senate plan is passed, the US health system will continue to be the least efficient among developed nations by a factor of at least two, and that will be a continuing drag on the economy at a time in history when we can ill-afford it.