Neocomradess Sh. Dalmia, a minor-league Hoovervillain employed at Forbes magazine, has deftly summed up the case for the salus quo as follows:
| Lie One: No one will be compelled to buy coverage. Lie Two: No new taxes on employer benefits. Lie Three: Government can control rising health care costs better than the private sector. Lie Four: A public plan won't be a Trojan horse for a single-payer monopoly. Lie Five: Patients don't have to fear rationing. |
That reiterated Hell word is the wingnutette’s own of course, Dr. Bones. Would I stick it in? After all, you and I have long since agreed that we will not call convenient political error and self-servicin’ of the Dalmian sort without irrefutable evidence. So it follows at once that ideospecimens like Sh. Dalmia are not lyin’ when they merrily announce that their own President is a liar. Regardless of what President Summers and Mr. Obama may be up to, Neocomradess Sh. Dalmia cannot be lyin’ when she believes every word she emits with 100.0% subjective sincerity. [1]
Three points of the Neocomradess Prosecutor’s five-point perjury indictment are patently about matters of contingent future fact: #1, #2, and #4.
Point #5 is as well, I think, for it seems unlikely that Sh. Dalmia wants any of her marks and dupes to worry about whether to worry about rationin’ right this instant. Consideration of anecdotes about the salus quo wherein (say) dreadfully ill persons do not get the best treatment known to doctorkind and croak or languish in agony because somebody somehow fails to come up with (say) $145,409.13 would not be useful from the Forbesio-Dalmian viewpoint.
Now if you or I were conductin’ the Hoovervillainous case, Dr. Bones, we would be just plain fibbing when we insinuate that President Summers and Mr. Obama are going to introduce the ‘rationing’ of medical care to the holy Homeland™. We would know the better but say the worse, which is almost the dictionary definition of ‘lying’.
A devout neocomradess like Sh. Dalmia cannot look at her own agitprop activies with so very unenchanted an eye as that, however. Presumably the fact that Lord Mammon has no central bureau of operations is more than enough to persuade his slaves that the word ‘rationing’ is utterly inapplicable to the salus quo. Mlle. de la Main Invisible, peut-elle s’engager dans le rationnement? Quelle idée! "If you desperately needed the expensive procedure yesterday and didn't get it, you were not rationed out of it, Ms. Cadaver, you were only . . . ."
I fear I cannot finish that sentence with any confidence, Dr. Bones. It's plain that Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh and all of Wingnut City would rather be waterboarded to a man than admit that when the Blessèd Market declines to grant somethin’ it makes the least bit of sense to talk about rationin’. But how they describe the denial themselves is not clear at all, beyond the obvious "But after all, if you could not pay for it, Ms. Cadaver! I mean, what on earth did you expect?"
Perhaps it does not matter how the neocomradely community would describe medical rationing when their system does it, because, if they have any brains at all, they will try to make sure that anecdotes of that sort simply do not come up for discussion at all. And what is true for a Harry & Louise national coffeklatsch in particular is true broadly and generally: the slaves of Lord Mammon are doin’ the best for their Master when they avoid any suggestion that He even has a system. Wingnutettes and wingnuts who prate blithely about Capitalism are decidedly the weaker siblin’s of the Big Management Party and the AEIdeology. They can do Kiddie Konservatism no good by borrowin’ language from their own worst enemies. I suppose it must be a consequence of wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung that one hears so many of them makin’ this fool mistake of late. The stronger siblin’s of Big Party and AEIdeology stick with the traditional approach: Lord Mammon's Way is not any kind of ‘system’, ‘capitalist’ or otherwise, it is only ... well ... you know ... it is simply The Way the World Works, it is normalcy or business-as-usual. Maybe on rare occasions, especially at banquets of the Chamber of Commerce after the catechumens have been dismissed and the hatches securely battened, it can be hypostasised a little and adored as "Free Enterprise," but that wordin’ is already gettin’ into the danger zone, no matter how dearly junior sweet puppies of Endarkenment love that four-letter ‘F’ word.
I think there can be no doubt at all, Dr. Bones, that the neocomrades of militant extremism would be well advised to try to make their favorite hired Hand inaudible as well as Invisible. Perhaps more so now than ever, for here in the immediate wake of the Crawford Crash it is not in the neocomradely interest to admit the existence of a ‘system’ that went wrong but might perhaps be regulated to keep it on the rails in future. Much better for them if as many Homelanders™ as possible can be persuaded to file the recent and continuing troubles under "Shit happens." [2]
(( My own account of Ms. Cadaver and the $145,409.13 (from a Hoovervillainous perspective) is that the poor woman was merely misexercising her unalienable right to win the lottery. It would not, after all, be a lottery if all the tickets were winnin’ tickets! But there is little point in troubling Neocomradess Sh. Dalmia of Forbes with what Mr. McCloskey would say in defense of wingnutism, had he the honour to be a wingnut. Sh. Dalmia works for the AEI/GOP Agitprop Arm, and, although the lottery theory of Kiddie Konservatism may be an admirable guide to action, it is not a thing that can be frankly discussed in public where actual and potential marks and dupes can overhear and be scared off. ’Nuff said! ))
That analysis leaves
| Lie Three: GOVERNMENT CAN CONTROL RISING HEALTH CARE COSTS BETTER THAN THE PRIVATE SECTOR. |
as the only pseudomendacity that is not located in the future contingent. It could be, the neocomradess might mean "President Summers and Mr. Obama will not in fact be able to reduce risin’ health care costs any better than Mlle. de la Main Invisible is on course to reduce them already." She could mean that, but the chances that she really does are very slight. It seems plain that what we have here is only a variant of the kiddies’ golden oldie "I’m from the government and I’m here to help you." Ha ha.
Let us examine the neosophistry that Sh. Dalmia fortifies her Lie IV with:
| Ignoring the reality that Medicare--the government-funded program for the elderly--has put the country on the path to fiscal ruin, Obama wants to model a government insurance plan--the so-called "public option"--after Medicare in order to control the country's rising health care costs. Why? Because, he repeatedly claims, Medicare has far lower administrative costs and overhead than private plans--to wit, 3% for Medicare compared to 10% to 20% for private plans. Hence, he says, subjecting private plans to competition against an entity delivering such superior efficiency will release health care dollars for universal coverage. But lower administrative costs do not necessarily mean greater efficiency. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office analysis last year chastised Medicare's lax attitude on this front. "The traditional fee-for-service Medicare program does relatively little to manage benefits, which tends to reduce its administrative costs but may raise its overall spending relative to a more tightly managed approach," it noted on page 93. In short, extending the Medicare model will further ruin--not improve--even the functioning aspects of private plans. |
That is technical enough to be mildly interesting. Unfortunately for the konservative kiddies and for their Lord Mammon, though, it does not take proper account of the militant extremist constituency as a whole. The plain implication of the CBO oracle, should you choose to accept it, is that bureaucrats don't waste money, doctors (&c.) waste money. If that revelation scores five points against conjectural Obamacare, it scores fifty against the really existin’ salus quo.
A little more obscure, but equally important, is that the neocomradess has dodged the chief point about ‘efficiency’ raised by President Summers and Mr. Obama, which had to do with the overhead of insurance corporations rather than of Dr. Welby and Nurse Nightin’gale. I guess this is what one ought to have expected of the Forbesio-Dalmian mindset: it makes far more sense for a cultivated despiser to abuse "Big Insurance" than it would to pick on "Big Medicine." The interests that Neocomradess Sh. Dalmia is especially concerned to defend are sufficient concentrated for her own corporation to be able to offer investment advice about them, whereas doctors and nurses and paramedicals are scattered piecemeal all over the landscape at random. The AMA is all very well in its way, but nevertheless, one cannot make a killin’ in it on Wall Street.
Accordin’ly, this neocomradess may be a godsend for Aetna and Blue Shield, but quacks actually in practice had better watch her closely. They should notice how she aligns herself with the CBO in favor of doin’ "relatively [a lot more] to manage benefits." Naturally if such language had come from the Administration, Sh. Dalmia would instantly have turned it into a nightmarish soundin’ proposal for the bureaucratic micromanagement of medical practice. As her agitprop stands, it must mean we are to have future micromanagement of hospitals and clinics by insurance corporations -- if it means anythin’ much at all.
After a noticer notices that point, he is likely enough to move on to wonder why on Gore’s green earth Big Insurance has not been doin’ exactly that for the last fifty or sixty years. (Perhaps there are laws against it? Seems unlikely!) I daresay the quacks will not be interfered with too much, should the holy Homeland™ be preserved from the immediate menace of Psocialised Medicine: it is much easier for the paper-pushers to take the providers’ word for what provision costs, after all, than to look into it deeply themselves. Up to the point where nearly everybody falls in the same low class as the late Ms. Cadaver, insurers can always just pass the (possibly overpriced) costs along to the ‘consumer’, with the added bennie, peculiar to their own branch of industry, that not one consumer in a hundred thousand will connect his own monthly premiums with how much Dr. Greedy billed for the treatment of Mr. Lucky -- a bill ScroogeCare paid without battin' an eye or askin’ a question, though possibly with a moment of actuarial reflection about next year's efficiency-won rate reductions.
Happy days.
___
[1] And the most important moral of that is that subjective sincerity counts for nothing or little in politics. But the present scribble will confine itself to secondary morals.
[2] The absolutely ideal rubric would be Palæocomrade A. Pope’s "Whatever is, is right." However in these Latter Days of the Law, one can scarcely expect the late Ms. Cadaver to take so heroic a view as that of her own demise. As everybody knows, even the Friends of Eddie Burke have to water down their guru’s firewater quite a bit to arrive at a product marketable here in the holy Homeland™ of 2009, where, due to an unfortunate mistake in the 1820’s or thereabouts, the lower orders are permitted to exist politically.
Plus naturally there is the trivial obstacle that very few lemmin’s in the ranks of militant extremism are prepared to grant that President Summers and Mr. Obama must somehow be right just because they ARE.
No comments:
Post a Comment