The Truth, And What The Other Guy Says

Crazy people made us distrust government; David Brooks is crazy like a fox; Remember “last in, first out”? About that... AND: A threat to manipulation and distortion

People might trust government less because people like her were once in it—not the other way around. | Original: Comedy Central / NY Times

Charles Blow says that all those crazy lies about health care and Obama and socialism coming from the extreme right—not to mention their curiously high uptake among the populace—is at heart an expression of the loss of faith in government.

These fluctuations [of trust in the federal government] highlight a peculiar quirk of recent American politics—according to an analysis of The New York Times/CBS News polls from the past 33 years, Americans seem to trust the government substantially more after a Republican president is elected than they do after a Democratic one is elected—at least at the outset. ... That said, it stands to reason that many people probably don’t trust Washington on health care reform because, right now at least, they just don’t trust Washington.

I agree that Americans have lost faith in government. That’s probably because America has lost faith in the cause of its civilization: No Cold War, no civil rights movement, no Apollo program, a dead women’s liberation movement easily hijacked by those who want to label Sarah Palin critics as sexist. What good is a government with no real goals or vision? It doesn’t help at all that the average American has seen their real incomes, the potency of their vote, and the time they have at home with their families shrink instead of grow in recent decades.

And then there’s the quirk about Democrats having less faith in government when Democrats take office. That’s probably because Republicans are the go-to party in good times (Ike in ’52, Nixon in ’68, Bush 43 in ’00, conspicuous outlier being Reagan in ’80 ), and Democrats are there to clean up the mess they leave (Carter after Nixon/Ford, Clinton after Reagan/Bush, and, yeah).

But there has to be more to the story. How else can we explain Tim Pawlenty, the supposed moderate from Minnesota, going apeshit on Obama’s utterly uninteresting speech to schoolchildren as if the 44th president were some kind of brainwashing Pied Piper? Or American Catholic Bishops, sounding more like Club for Growth members, decrying supposed government-funded health care despite the Vatican’s own health care system? Or how one person can make their entire career out of spreading health care falsehoods as if she worked for AHIP the whole time?

How can Americans trust government or anyone else in political life when political discourse can be hijacked by people whose game plan is to assert, with no evidence, that a policy to provide an option or suggestion is really a dictation or a mandate—and then equate it to Hitler?

Blow asserts that the crazies are winning arguments because people don’t trust government. But isn’t it the other way around?

Big Steps Sideways

David Brooks is some kind of genius. He says Barack Obama should "get fundamental" when it comes to health care reform, and by that, he means to avoid major reforms that have been shown to work in all other wealthy countries and go for some weird, radical and backwards ideas, like the ones proposed in an article from the Atlantic he lauds. Brooks knows something we don’t, because if he doesn’t, he’d surely end up looking like a guy trying to propose pitifully naive solutions to America’s health care crisis as part of some lame, Sisyphean vision to rebuild the conservative intellectual edifice.

The article Brooks cites, "How American Health Care Killed My Father" by business executive David Goldhill, is itself weird, radical and backwards. As the title suggests, Goldhill blames the American health care system for his father’s hospital-borne infection and resultant death. He might have a point. But, if you’ll forgive the cliché, the prescription is worse than the disease:

To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy. We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.

Not only is this market fundamentalism utter nonsense since the health industry doesn’t operate anything like any other industry and never will, but this supposed fundamental change is really a recommendation to entrench the worst problems of the American health system: For-profit insurance and health providers holding all the cards, and most people’s inability afford the care they really need.

Goldhill dismisses any notion of government-run health insurance because, he asserts with little evidence, government can’t hold down costs. Except when it can:

Many reformers believe if we could only adopt a single-payer system, we could deliver health care more cheaply than we do today. The experience of other developed countries suggests that’s true: the government as single payer would have lower administrative costs than private insurers, as well as enormous market clout and the ability to bring down prices, although at the cost of explicitly rationing care.

But even leaving aside the effects of price controls on innovation and customer service, today’s Medicare system should leave us skeptical about the long-term viability of that approach.

And Medicare seems to be Goldhill’s real whipping boy, time and time again cited for its inefficiencies, waste, and the insurance program’s alleged moral hazard problem. But Medicare seems to hold down costs better than the rest of the U.S. health care system. Hmmmm...

This all started with a tragic story of an avoidable hospital-induced infection that killed one man. Then it ended up as a diatribe against Medicare. Like most arguments against the current course of health care reform, Goldhill’s is confusing, ideological, and based on distortions.

Reuters / National Post

First to step in it, last to wipe it off

From Stephen Harper, in March, on how Canada will weather the recession:

"Canada was the last advanced country to fall into this recession," Mr. Harper said. "We will make sure its effects here are the least severe and we will come out faster than anyone and stronger than ever."

Stevey-H added that if the budget failed, then the recession would be the Liberals’ fault, or something.

And now, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, this month, on how Canada has done in the downturn:

Canada will emerge from the recession more slowly than other developed countries, according to a new forecast. Today’s report ... forecasts that Canada’s economy will grow 0.4 per cent in the last three months of this year. That meagre expansion would put Canada on par with Italy, and ahead of the U.K. Only Japan’s economy is expected to continue shrinking in the final quarter of this year, at a rate of 0.9 per cent, according to the report.

Good call.

A Threat To Manipulation and Distortion

Media executive James Murdoch warns that the expansion of the BBC, the evil British institution that does such things as report the news from around the world and analyze it in the best spirit of television journalism, constitutes a threat to independent journalism.

"As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion," Murdoch said, referring to George Orwell’s book, "1984."

Because manipulation and distortion is the job of corporate news outlets, like Fox News and the opinion pages of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal—all owned by Murdoch’s dad, Rupert.

Manipulation and distortion and wiretapping.

And apologizing for Hitler. End.