Hard Choices

by digby

I happened to catch a rerun of one of those Arthur Miller seminars on PBS called Reinventing Health Care. There was the usual array of people from different parts of the health care system represented, everyone from a rural doctor who treats people mostly for free to giant health care CEOs. (The biggest asshole, of course, was a lying piece of work named Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute, followed closely by some wingnut harridan from Harvard Business School who thinks that we should “give money back to the people” because “it’s their money.”)

When one of the health care CEOs said that there’s magical thinking that says government is an endless pot of money and we have to make “hard choices” Pete Peterson Foundation president David Walker said this:

News flash. The government has no money. The government is running huge deficits it’s tens of trillions of dollars in the hole in real accounting on an accrual basis and if there’s one thing that can bankrupt America, it’s health care and we’re going to have to make choices and one of the choices we have to make is how do we ration, rationally.

He kept saying that people need “basic and essential” coverage, whatever that means.

I don’t believe that David Walker thinks we shouldn’t reform health care. He said some other things in the program that indicated he believed that there should be some form of universal coverage, scientific outcomes and other reasonable things. But his and others’ insistence on talking about rationing is going to tank the thing because that’s exactly what Frank Luntz has determined is the kiss of death.

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