Michael Cannon believes that advocates of universal coverage are driven less by serious policy considerations than by a species of religious conviction. He provides the following quote from Jonathan Cohn as proof:
To believe in universal health care is to believe that we can do more and do better, all at once — that it is possible to have hospitals full […]
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Posted 08 July 2008
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Ever wonder why Lefties have such difficulty absorbing and correctly interpreting objective data? Well, Ezra Klein inadvertantly provides a hint in his latest piece on Romneycare, which begins thus:
Everyone who looks at the Massachusetts health reform plan sees what they want to see.
What we have here, of course, is a textbook case of projection. It isn’t “everyone” who […]
A personality trait common among progressives is an inability to admit it when they have been wrong. This is what causes them to doggedly defend favorite programs long after they have been shown to be miserable failures. A case in point is the latest NYT editorial about the 2006 Massachusetts universal health care initiative:
Massachusetts’s pioneering plan to provide universal health coverage […]
In an allusion to Boston’s incompetently executed and egregiously expensive road repair project, today’s WSJ calls Romneycare The New Big Dig:
The Massachusetts nonmiracle ought to be a warning to Washington. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both proposing versions of RomneyCare on a national scale, with similar promises that covering everyone under a government plan will reduce costs.
But, as anyone remotely […]
Last year I wrote a post suggesting that universal health care advocates are such prisoners of their ideology that facts have little or no meaning for them. Well, Paul Krugman has written a column that pretty much proves my case.
He begins by reciting a couple of anecdotes, including the tall tale that got Hillary in hot water recently. […]
Single-payer advocates are forever producing opinion polls that purport to show how the public or the medical community support some version of nationalized health care. Invariably, such surveys turn out to have been conducted using tendentious methodology.
Oddly, legitimate surveys using reputable methods always seem to produce different results. A good example is the latest Rasmussen poll. That survey of 1,000 adults shows […]
During last year’s debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, President Bush was routinely excoriated in the media for saying that many states had diverted SCHIP funds from poor kids to children and adults from families with incomes exceeding $80,000. He was right, of course, as AP reports:
People earning as much as $295,000 are enrolled in a state health care […]
Single-payer activists tell us that Medicare-for-All would be nothing like socialized medicine because health care providers would not be directly owned and operated by our masters in D.C. In the real world, however, the golden rule (He who has the gold, rules.) applies to health care just as it does to everything else.
If government bureaucrats control who gets paid […]
Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute has written an excellent policy analyis showing that the health care systems of other countries often don’t live up to the claims made for them by American advocates of government-run health care. His findings include the following:
Health insurance does not mean universal access to health care.
Rising health care costs are not a uniquely […]
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Posted 25 March 2008
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The National Federation of Independent Business recently hosted a mandate debate between Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, Sherry Glied of Columbia University, Bob Moffit of the Heritage Foundation, and Peter Harbage of the Center for American Progress.
Cannon, at one point in the discussion, questioned the fairness of forcing healthy young people to buy insurance when they may wish to […]
