Health Care BS

The Nobel Prize committee, having long ago destroyed its credibility by awarding its Peace Prize to terrorist Yasser Arafat, has rendered itself even more ridiculous by awarding this year’s Economics Prize to Enron advisor and Reagan official Paul Krugman.

Krugman is nothing more than a partisan opportunist. An example of how his ”analyses” are driven by politics is his “evolving” assessment of Obamacare. During the primaries, when he was hoping to get a spot in the Hillary Clinton administration, he repeatedly trashed Obama’s health care positions:

He’s doing the same thing in the health care debate he did when claiming Social Security faces a “crisis� … echoing right-wing talking points.

Indeed, he went further by suggesting that Obama was running a dishonest and underhanded campaign:

During the closing days of the Pennsylvania primary fight, the Obama campaign ran a TV ad repeating the dishonest charge that the Clinton plan would force people to buy health insurance they can’t afford.

As the Obama campaign pointed out, Krugman’s criticisms constituted a reversal of his earlier enthusiasm for Obamacare. And what did Krugman do when Hillary lost? He flipped back to his previous position of support for Obamacare:

Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector.

Transparent opportunism led Krugman to participate in the Reagan Administration, which he now claims to disdain, and it will cause him to change his positions on Obama (and all questions of economics) according to the political needs of the moment.

And yet we are asked to take him as seriously as we take real economists like Milton Friedman. I don’t think so.