I can never decide who is more clueless on health care, Paul Krugman or Ezra Klein. The former is wrong more often, but he is so disingenuous it is hard to know what he really thinks. The latter, however, seems to honestly believe the goofy things he writes about health care.
A case in point is his response to Jonah Goldberg’s recent post at The Corner about how readily Canadians and Europeans embrace big government. By way of disproving Goldberg’s thesis about the differences between these submissive cultures and the American ethos, Klein offers the following:
America has multiple health care systems, some government-run, some privately administered. In every case, Americans … report higher levels of satisfaction in the public programs. For instance, the elderly report 61 percent satisfaction with their health care system, which is government-run Medicare … Even the poor, who largely rely on Medicaid, free clinics, and the like are at 41 percent, higher than those of us in private care.
Klein predictably misses the real significance of his own figures. The real shocker here is that two-fifths of Medicare patients and three-fifths of Medicaid patients aren’t satisfied despite receiving medical treatment on someone else’s dime! How good can these systems be if so many patients receiving free care are still unhappy?
He also fails to notice that his private care satisfaction statistics conflict with one another. This source, which he quotes relating to the VA, says 73% of private care patients are satisfied. This source, which he quotes in reference to Medicare, gives the figure at 34%. So, which is it?
Klein’s analyses on any number of issues are riddled with such discrepancies. So, I think the “most clueless” award has to go to him.
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