oh dear. and i thought the acorn is going to kill us list of rightwing talking points about obamacare was funny...

i am so going to steal this one from you. it works on several levels.

but back on topic, those 2 posts made me see red, and it only got worse when she later whinged about how there was no grass roots movement for single payer. pnhp was founded in the 1980s and if could find them with a little googling 2 years ago, so could digby.

the dutch had a very good health care system, and much of what we 'know' about it [stuff like world rankings in mortality, life expectancy, affordability, fairness, etc] is from pre-'reform' days. we'll just have to give it a few years to see if the privatization experiment works out. australia has done some going back and forth to and from private and public funding; seems people really do like having government-sponsored health insurance once they get a taste of it.

I'm not sure. And I'm curious about that.

Remember that he (with Robin Wells) wrote in the NYRB only 3.5 years ago:

Can we fix health care?
Health policy experts know a lot more about the economics of health care now than they did when Bill Clinton tried to remake the US health care system. And there's overwhelming evidence that the United States could get better health care at lower cost if we were willing to put that knowledge into practice. But the political obstacles remain daunting.

A mere shift of power from Republicans to Democrats would not, in itself, be enough to give us sensible health care reform. While Democrats would have written a less perverse drug bill, it's not clear that they are ready to embrace a single-payer system. Even liberal economists and scholars at progressive think tanks tend to shy away from proposing a straightforward system of national health insurance. Instead, they propose fairly complex compromise plans. Typically, such plans try to achieve universal coverage by requiring everyone to buy health insurance, the way everyone is forced to buy car insurance, and deal with those who can't afford to purchase insurance through a system of subsidies. Proponents of such plans make a few arguments for their superiority to a single-payer system, mainly the (dubious) claim that single-payer would reduce medical innovation. But the main reason for not proposing single-payer is political fear: reformers believe that private insurers are too powerful to cut out of the loop, and that a single-payer plan would be too easily demonized by business and political propagandists as "big government."

These are the same political calculations that led Bill Clinton to reject a single-payer system in 1993, even though his advisers believed that a single-payer system would be the least expensive way to provide universal coverage. Instead, he proposed a complex plan designed to preserve a role for private health insurers. But the plan backfired. The insurers opposed it anyway, most famously with their "Harry and Louise" ads. And the plan's complexity left the public baffled.

We believe that the compromise plans being proposed by the cautious reformers would run into the same political problems, and that it would be politically smarter as well as economically superior to go for broke: to propose a straightforward single-payer system, and try to sell voters on the huge advantages such a system would bring. But this would mean taking on the drug and insurance companies rather than trying to co-opt them, and even progressive policy wonks, let alone Democratic politicians, still seem too timid to do that.

So what will really happen to American health care? Many people in this field believe that in the end America will end up with national health insurance, and perhaps with a lot of direct government provision of health care, simply because nothing else works. But things may have to get much worse before reality can break through the combination of powerful interest groups and free-market ideology.

I still find that last line chilling.

I really hope he responds in some way to my question of what his absolute bottom line is, in terms of what is worth passing as health care insurance reform, at this point. I would hate to think he would ask us to accept something that will make things worse in the short run so that we'll be pushed to ask for reform again. Because, for those of us who are hit by the problems created by having to rely on for-profit insurers, "worse" is not just a matter of having to dig up a decades-old marriage license.

(Sorry to be so dramatic, Paul, but I really do wonder.)

i don't read his columns anymore, just his blog.

definitely no nobel-class analysis there, but the guy's a trade economist, not a health policy wonk. still, someone with his smarts and connections could have asked around looking for a health policy wonk from the left, don mccanne, frinstance, to analyze the bill[s] from a health policy viewpoint.

as to whether he's changed or not, you're probably right. i did go out and buy his book, and while all my liberal friends were excited about it, i found it too centrist for my taste.

i've been toying with posting on this very subject, because i think this gets to the heart of a lot of problems we've got on the left.

i wasn't, however, thinking of calling them benevolent. now that you mention it, though, i think it's a very good characterization.