Single payer advocates can’t make up their minds about the problem with the ACA
Ever since the Affordable Care Act was passed, the left wing critics of it—especially the single payer advocates—have said, wrongly, that it was passed at the behest of the insurance companies and that subsidies in the exchanges are a handout to them. This was never true for few reasons, not least because the insurance companies spend at least a hundred and forty million or so opposing the ACA. Now, to my great surprise, one of the leaders of the single payer movement in PA, Chuck Pennacchio, has posted an article on Facebook in which he seems to entirely reverse direction without noticing it.
David Brooks gets it wrong about education and health care
David Books outdid himself today in writing post about education and health care that is completely misleading about improvements in both in the last fifty years and about the limits of productivity increases in both areas. It takes more than a FB status update to explain why. Read this blog post for details. The short story though, is that if you really think there haven’t been any improvements in either education or medical care in this country since 1960, you don’t deserve to have your opinions appear on the op-ed page of The New York Times. And if you think that huge productivity increases in labor intensive fields are possible, then maybe you should explain why NY Times columnists do only two columns a week instead of the three they did in the 1960s.
What the Court did, Why, and what it means for politics and health care policy
We got very good news from the Supreme Court today. There are no constitutional barriers to the ACA going fully into effect. The exchanges, subsidies for insurance and the expansion of Medicaid will provide affordable…
Two thoughts in advance of the Supreme Court decision
Can we progressives not attack each other after the decision? I’m going to be writing more about the ACA and the Court after we hear the decision. But here is one plea in advance of…