Hilarious opinion piece by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek. A few choice quotes:
I’m with that woman who wrote the president complaining about “socialized medicine” and added: “Now keep your hands off my Medicare.” That’s the spirit!
It seems fair to me that cost-cutting bureaucrats at the insurance companies—not doctors—decide what’s reimbursable. After all, the insurance companies know best.
Through a wonderful program called Medicare Advantage, the insurance companies receive hundreds of billions of dollars in fees to administer a program that the government is already running. Don’t touch that baby. You’d be messing with the handiwork of some fine lobbyists.
We could save our whole system if we just capped malpractice awards. Two of our biggest states—California and Texas—did it a few years ago and nothing has changed there, but who cares? It sounds good.
So tell your congressmen and senators when they’re home for the summer recess that it’s too soon to address this issue. We’ve only been debating it for 97 years, since Theodore Roosevelt put national health insurance in the Bull Moose Party platform of 1912. We’ve only had 745 congressional hearings on the subject (I made that number up, but it’s got to be close). That’s not enough!
