Paul Krugman, via Economist’s View, is sounding more and more like Colonel Jack D. Ripper when discussing health care. Whereas Colonel Ripper was fearful that dark forces were undermining his precious bodily fluids, Krugman’s bêtes noire are apparently after Medicare:
The plot against Medicare … the stealth privatization embedded in the Medicare Modernization Act, which Congress literally passed in the dead of night back in 2003, is proceeding apace.
Then, applying the same sort of reasoning that Colonel Ripper used to detect commie infiltration of the U.S. Army, Krugman has discovered “fellow travelers” in the Democratic coalition:
The forces behind privatization … have also been finding useful idiots within the newly powerful Democratic coalition. … the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens have become patsies for the insurance industry.
What Krugman is really upset about, of course, is that the market-oriented Part-D program is working. It is saving the government money and it is helping low-income minorities. Rather than admit that, however, he advises that advocacy groups like the NAACP are too dumb to know what’s going on:
What seems to have happened is that both groups have been taken in by insurance industry disinformation, which falsely claims that minorities benefit disproportionately from this subsidy.
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