Virginia Postrel: Hey, If Obama Really Can "Save" So Much in Medicare with His Reforms, Why Doesn't He Just Do That Before He Nationalizes Health Care?

Good question. Obama is selling health care nationalization on the premise that he can actually save the government money by having the government insure most people. The underlying premise to that is that his scary-smart reforms (reforms no president ever before thought of, suggested, or supported) will drastically bring down the price of health care for everyone.

Well -- if so, then these "reforms" are an unmitigated good on their own and ought to be implemented post-haste, on their own. There is no reason to couple them to expanding health care coverage, and very good reasons to decouple the two. For one thing, we can actually see if these "reforms" produce the promised savings and therefore have a better idea of how expensive, on the net, Obamacare will be.

Virginia Postrel quizzes Obamanaut Peter Orszag on this point, but Orszag doesn't really defend his claim that "reform" and nationalization must be done at the same.

He does promise further "dialog," though.

Isn't that wonderful.

posted by Ace at 02:09 PM

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