Why we need universail health care

Seattle, WA

June 7th, 2011

7:18 am


As usual, Brooks wraps his demagoguery in a haze of oversimplification.

Statements from Rep. Pelosi and others that Medicare benefits need not be reduced do not represent "doing nothing." Rather, they point the way towards restructuring Medicare so that it can provide health security to seniors in a much more cost effective manner. For example, as Paul Krugman and other have written, Canada and other countries achieve health security for seniors (and even young and middle aged people!) in a manner that is much more cost-effective than the U.S. Medicare program. They accomplish this by not being allergic to single-payer or other forms of centralized governmental planning.

Brooks pitches the so-called "decentralized market-based" approach, but that's how traditional employer-provided health insurance works, and from a cost control point of view it has been a total failure. Most large companies have teams of health care buyers, or insurance providers who act on their behalf in negotiating with health care providers. These are sophisticated consumers, and yet this approach has totally failed to reduce health care costs. Why on earth would anyone think that seniors buying individual coverage, with their bewildering confusion of policy provisions and hidden exclusions and all the other forms of fraud practiced by insurance companies, would reduce costs by any means other than just denying health care?

The Republican approach is to reduce health care spending through the simple means of making health care unaffordable for many seniors. Yes, that saves the government money, but families have to pick up the pieces by paying for care for their aging parents. We, the middle class, will get slammed by this when our aging parents need care.

Brooks slams "top-down control," but the fact is this: many other countries use top-down control for health care, and it works much better than our decentralized so-called "free-market" approach. It's been tried, it works, and it costs much less than what we do.

Mr. Brooks, when are you going to write about European health care systems? When are you going to offer some reasons why we should not move in the same direction as the rest of the civilized world?

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