Are You Listening Mr President?

by digby

The cheese eating francophile Roger Cohen in the NY Times dispels some of the myths about the French health care system and points out that in many ways it actually mirrors our own:

So beyond all the hectoring, the main French-American difference on health care is not ideological but a question of efficiency. Both countries use a mixture of public and private. France is at a very far remove from “socialism.” The United States has already “socialized” a significant portion of its medicine. (Nothing illustrates right-wing ideological madness in the United States better than calls from some to “keep the government out of my Medicare!”)

The real difference is that the French state mandates health coverage for everyone, picks up the tab where necessary (as for the unemployed), holds down costs through a national fee system, and uses mainly nonprofit mutual insurers even for supplemental private coverage. The profit motive is outweighed by the principle of universal health care, with a corresponding effect on doctors’ salaries.

These are real distinctions. But the “socialism sucks” Republican broadside on Obama’s reform plans — with its overtone that the “cosmopolitan” president wants to “Europeanize” American medicine — is nonsense. It’s nonsense because the free market is vigorous in France (and Europe), because there are all sorts of European approaches to health (within the compulsory coverage), and because the United States has already “socialized” aplenty without turning its capitalism pink.

As Peter Baldwin makes clear in an interesting new book called “The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are alike,” U.S.-European contrasts can often be more about playing politics by comforting old myths — individualist at the new frontier versus collectivist at the beach — than facts.

He is impatient with both sides of the divide and takes his French friends to task for assuming that that America has some primitive wild west system where the is no government involvement, when in fact many, many millions of Americans are in some kind of government paid health care.

Then he explains as well as anyone I’ve seen why the public option is important (and why liberals care about it):

Still some facts of the trans-Atlantic health care contrast are disturbing and justify the incredulity of my French friends, none more so than the furor over President Obama’s support for a government insurance option (like Medicare) that would, among other things, keep private insurers honest. Its Republican critics have portrayed this idea as so dangerous it represents a fight for freedom over tyranny.

So Obama has retreated a little and portrayed this option as a “only a means to an end” that could be discarded. He should not retreat. The public option best enshrines the principle of the state’s commitment to insuring everyone.

Yes. Enshrined within the public option is the principle of universal health care. That’s why it’s politically and morally important to include it.

h/t to bb

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