They Don't Get It

Right after the election, liberal uberblogger Atrios ran this piece, "Really Bad Ideas That the Media Loves and Democrats Must Resist". It's worth looking at, just to see what the other side is thinking.

It starts:

1) "privatizing" Social Security. I don't worry so much about benefits being cut. The upshot of a growing population of old people is that it's a growing populating of old people who vote. But, this will just be the Treasury Looting Act of 2005. Firms will get their fees, funds will be looted, then they'll be bailed out, rinse, repeat...

I dug back through Atrios' archives, to 1924, with his grandfather's comments about the pending Immigration Reform Act: "The upshot of a growing population of Italian people is that it's a growing population of immigrant people who vote. But this will just be the Treasury Looting Act of 1925. Lawyers will get their fees, organized crime will rise and control our cities, rinse, repeat...". Any human activity will draw the dishonest. The possibility of dishonesty is no reason to swear off progress; you just have to guard against the dishonesty.

2) "Medical Savings Accounts." Insurance is about reducing risk and uncertainty. Forcing people to cover their medical costs by hording [sic] a big pile of cash they can't spend until they get sick is a just a weird idea. And, it might have the added advantage of destroying the private health insurance market entirely.

Where do you even start with this - words fail - completely incoherent statement? Medical Savings Accounts change nothing about the philosophy of insurance; they merely introduce some consumer-side market discipline into the use of the flood of office visits and smaller procedures that make up the bulk of insurance claims. The only thing that "forces" the hoarding of cash are the IRS regulations for using pre-tax income deductions. Atrios' last sentence is presumably a snark - the destruction of private insurance would pave the way for a Canadian-style single-payer healthcare quagmire - but in fact MSAs would likely make private insurance viable again; HMOs have come to have most of the disadvantages of single-payer systems (rationing, gross inefficiency, a detached, overworked and paperwork-bound medical staff) with none of the advantages of the free market (downward pressure on the price of individual transactions, pushing of resposibility for transactional negotiation to the individual level). MSAs, which combine a high-deductible, low-cost catastrophic care policy with a cash account funded with pre-tax dollars to cover the deductible for things like office visits and cheaper procedures; doctors frequently charge lower rates for cash-and-carry visits and simple procedures, since there's no insurance company paperwork to do.

3) Tort reform. The "Moron-American Act of 2005." You get what you wish for, I guess.

While I have a few problems with the way the administration envisions tort reform, Atrios provides no reasons to discuss the issue, approaching the issue with his usual "snark and run" approach.

4) Bankruptcy reform. Oh Lord help us.

5) Enviornment. Well, everything.

As above, without the concomitant problems with the administration's approach.

6) Tax cuts. Oh, just let them have their g***amn tax cuts. The bond market'll snap like a twig at some point.

Just like it did under the Reagan Administration.

Posted by Mitch at November 9, 2004 05:00 AM | TrackBack