You know the wingnuts are back in business when Peggy Noonan stops opining about how we should avert our eyes from the past and gets back to unctuously defending Real Americans (who she personally avoids like the plague.) Here she is at her lugubrious worst:
What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis. Then came the Democratic Party charge that the people at the meetings were suspiciously well-dressed, in jackets and ties from Brooks Brothers. They must be Republican rent-a-mobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer said on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that people are “storming these town hall meetings,” that they were “well dressed,” that “this is all organized,” “all planned,” to “hurt our president.” Here she was projecting. For normal people, it’s not all about Barack Obama.
Noonan is just lying about the Nazi imagery. She is surely aware that the tea baggers have been showing up at events with Hitler on their minds for months, and there’s been plenty of it at the Town Halls as well. And you don’t have to wonder where it’s coming from:
According to Noonan, the people who believe that sort of thing are the “normal people.”
Noonan says that the real danger lies with Democrats claiming these protests are organized by the Republican party and Big Business which does damage to our civility and political tradition. And Charlie Cook seems to agree with her, although he does grant that the Republicans haven’t been helpful either. Here he was on MSNBC earlier:
Monica Somebody Novotny: So independents, we hear now, are more likely to believe Obama has made progress in changing Washington that they think he should have. How big of a problem is that?
Charlie Cook: I think it’s two different things. Independents early on were very supportive of anything and everything Obama wanted to do. And they’ve been souring overall on his overall approval on just about any question they want to ask. A lot of independents have lost faith in president Obama. And you see it on this question as well.
This problem of the poisonous partisanship that you see in Washington, it wasn’t created overnight, it’s not going to end overnight. But to use a cliche, it takes two to tango and I don’t think either side is making much of an effort.
The president is talking the talk but not so much walking the walk and the Democrats in the House and Senate, there’s not a lot of bipartisanship there and the Republicans aren’t either. So I’d say both sides are at fault here.
Monica: So you don’t think that one party then is more to blame than the other? Just loking at some of the numbers here on tone and civility. Since April many more Americans say the tone of civility between Republicans and Democrats has gotten worse, from 24% to 35%.
Cook: That’s the view from out there. But the view from having lived in Washington since 1972, this kind of partisanship started getting ugly an in the mid 80s and it’s gotten worse and worse worse since the mid-80s and it doesn’t matter whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge it’s just a long spiral downward.
Right Charlie. “Out here” we see that there is one party that has gone apeshit insane and has unleashed a bunch of bloodsucking zombies all over the country and another party that even with the best interpretation available, is so ineffectual it can’t hit water if it falls out of a fucking boat. I guess you can say that they are both to blame, but I don’t think my solution to that problem would be to his liking.
Cook believes that if only Obama had only reached out to these people who think he’s a Nazi/Commie/foreign usurper, they would have responded in kind. It takes two to tango — and the Republicans apparently love to dance. (Well, maybe not. Isn’t the tango an illegal alien dance?)
Cook went on to explain what really went wrong:
Cook:The thing is you have a non-bipartisan approach it’s like waving an empty gun around, an empty threat they really can’t do it.
But the bottom line is that they’re going to end up having to compromise to the point where if they’d started off dealing with Republicans in the very beginning, will probably end up in the same place, but they will have lost a lot of altitude in the process.
Since the Republicans want total failure, that’s obviously what he thinks we’ll get.
I’m not convinced of that. We’re in crazy August where sharks and swift boaters rule the airwaves. But I can’t say that these mobs aren’t going to have an effect. The zombie right is flexing its muscle and since the villagers still think these nuts are Real Americans — or as Noonan calls them “normal people” — they affect the media narrative and that affects public opinion. We’re already seeing it.
The woman crying and wailing “I’m scared” is a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier. People are scared. And the right wing is willing to name names and tell them who’s at fault. Indeed, after decades of conservative propaganda, blaming Obama for their woes — the liberal black man who represents the government — makes perfect sense to them. Rush is telling them so every single day.
If you have time to get through the whole thing, stay to the end to see the young man say he is a huge Obama fan (to huge applause, interestingly) and tell the evil Blue Dog Mike Ross that he was mad at him for selling out health care until he heard this crowd. I can see why he would say that. Ross couldn’t even convince these poor deluded souls that he wasn’t for single payer when he told them repeatedly that he wasn’t for single payer. But you can see by this how these demonstrations of crazy can change the political landscape, can’t you? That kid has a different view of what’s possible based upon the kooks that showed up to those town hall meetings.
That’s all the industry needs. It certainly all Mike Ross needs …
Update: I should point out that quite a few of these people are just plain old selfish assholes:
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It’s like say 100 percent of Americans in America, 80 percent of them have insurance, might more. I’m saying, it’s just the general presence. Why do 80 percent of us have to change and get something that y’all, the government, President Obama, is turning in with an agenda? (CHEERING) UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why does he have to change our way of life for that 20 percent? Congress’ job is mainly to protect us from terrorist, enemies, the borders.
Olbermann pointed out that this is just the old “I got mine, fuck you,” although he used nicer language. Jonathan Alter had a good reply:
ALTER: Well, first of all, she’s right that 80 percent, you know, have health care. Where she’s wrong is that somehow if they’ve got it, it’s going to be enough for them, or they’re not going to be in danger of losing it, should they lose their job. A lot of people nowadays are losing their jobs. So, what she’s not factoring in is what happens to people who have some sort of a change that happens in their lives? They get sick, they actually need health insurance, and it ends up being like homeowners, you know, insurance, where once you have a burglary, suddenly, they cancel your insurance. OLBERMANN: Right. ALTER: That’s what health insurance is like and people have not had big health challenges, I have, and others don’t understand that just because you’re insured doesn’t mean you’re protected. OLBERMANN: Right. ALTER: The second thing that she’s ignoring is the promise that President Obama’s made which is that, if you’re happy with your insurance, it’s not going to get taken away. I mean, if she loves her insurance company, God bless her. But she’s not going to have any problems with that insurance company, it’s not of any danger of going bust. They might jack up their premiums on her again, but…OLBERMANN: . or lower it because there’s competition from the public option.
I would bet money that the woman who said that considers herself a good Christian.
Dave Neiwert, who is not prone to use the F word indiscriminately:
No one has a problem with right-wingers marching in protest of the health-care plans. That’s certainly their right. And no one minds that they choose to participate in these forums. But town halls were never designed to be vehicles for protest. They have always been about enabling real democratic discourse in a civil setting.
When someone’s entire purpose in coming out to a town-hall forum is to chant and shout and protest and disrupt, they aren’t just expressing their opinions — they are actively shutting down democracy.
And that, folks, is a classically fascist thing to do.
There’s a lot of navel gazing about why the tea baggers are getting so much traction while the pro-reform Obama enthusaisasts seem to be dragging their feet. It’scertainly true that as Atrios and others have pointed out, it’s pretty hard to get excited about a plan that doesn’t exist, while getting people off their couches to protest a government plan to euthanize old people isn’t all that difficult. Sausage making is one thing, but the enthusiasm gap is unsurprising when we are expected to get excited about a heaping pile of fetid, decomposing mystery meat.
But there’s more to it than that I think. The Democrats gamed out a strategy in which the bills would be done by the August recess and the pols would have something concrete to take back to their districts and states. That didn’t happen, thanks to Max and Obstructors. So, they are out there having to battle back an avalanche of bullshit with more vague campaign promises about “reform.” When it became obvious they aren’t going to get it done, they probably should have held everyone in town through August — if was the right thing to do on the merits and would have had the salutory effect of avoiding the sideshow we are seeing now.
But I think the big problem is that the country is in a sour, sour mood in general and kumbaaya just isn’t selling at the moment. I think it’s a miracle that Obama has a high an approval rating as he does under these circumstances. Americans are spoiled complainers in the best of times. In bad times like this, they get downright surly.
These town hall spectacles are organized political theatre to be sure, with most of it being cynically manipulated for political reasons. But the reason they have power and salience is because they are expressing a lot of the free floating anxiety and inchoate rage that’s out there generally, not just among the crazy wingnuts. Anger, fear and frustration (the real thing, not the Hollywood, 9/11 war porn kind of fear, which is actually titillation and excitement) are what’s driving people, not the uplifting “hopenchange” of last year.
I think it’s true that it’s very difficult to expect people to get excited and come out to Town Halls to support this multi headed hydra of a health reform plan that doesn’t even yet exist. But I have my doubts that even if they had a solid bill from which they could tout all kinds of promises that people would be any more enthusiastic right now. The zeitgeist is overwhelmingly negative.
That’s why you need villains at times like this. And it took the Democrats far too long to realize that.
Update: Jonathan Cohn has some thoughts worth contemplating on all this.
As I’m watching a firefighter rappel down the side of a sky scraper to rescue a window washer whose scaffolding failed it occurs to me for the thousandth time that these people are a pure manifestation of heroic good in our society.
And they are unionized, public servants, paid by the taxpayers, which also makes them dirt in the eyes of 30% of the country. or it would, if that 30% understood even half the absurd bile that comes out of their mouths.
There’s been a lot of skepticism about the White House’s strategy of cutting deals in which industry players voluntarily promise to save money over the next 10 years. The skepticism is simple enough: If the pharmaceutical companies are willing to save $80 billion as a favor to Barack Obama, that suggests there’s a lot more than $80 billion that could, and probably should, be saved. As Nancy Pelosi told me, “The minute the drug companies settled for $80 billion, we knew it was $160 billion. Right? If they’re giving away $80 billion?” A few minutes later, she suggested that maybe those agreements weren’t inviolable. “The president made the agreements he made,” she said. “And maybe we’ll be limited by that. But maybe not!”A front-page story in today’s New York Times suggests that her optimism was misplaced. Billy Tauzin, head lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, hasn’t liked some of the cost-saving measures moving through the House. In particular, he’s worried about provisions that would allow doctors to negotiate prices with Medicare. So he sat down with a reporter and gave up the game. The deal that the pharmaceutical companies made with the White House wasn’t simply to offer up $80 billion in savings. It was to offer up $80 billion in savings so long as the White House promised to protect them from anything that would extract more than $80 billion in savings.
It’s often noted that Obama’s strategy on health reform is the opposite of Hillary Clinton’s in 1994. (See, for example, “The Ghosts of Clintoncare” by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post.) Instead of hiring Ira Magaziner to draft a bill and then shoving that bill down Congress’ throat, the Obama White House is letting Congress write the health reform bill. This strikes me as a reasonably shrewd strategy. But when you very deliberately aren’t controlling the legislative process, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to cut deals with special interests about what that legislation will contain. Health reform has a thousand interconnected parts. Give in on something here, and you have to make alterations on something there. That’s why Senate finance Chairman Max Baucus keeps saying, “Everything is on the table” (even though that isn’t strictly true). Obama has taken tens and perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars off the table by ruling out an elementary cost-saving measure whose rejection by the Republican congressional majority back in 2003 is an ongoing scandal. What did he get in return? The hope that other sectors in the health care industry would get on board with reform. But health reform’s principal target—the insurance companies—not only refuses to endorse the creation of a public-option government health insurance program, the one essential component to major health care reform; it refuses even to stop hunting for trivial reasons to cancel insurance for policyholders after they develop expensive-to-treat illnesses. (See “Why You Can’t Trust Your Health Insurer.”) Mr. President, you’ve been played for a sucker.
It doesn’t look that way to me. From where I sit, it’s the Dems in congress who got played. The president refused to produce a plan but cut a bunch of side deals, thus making sure the industry was protected while the congress gets blamed for being unable to make the numbers work.
That’s not to say that Baucus isn’t perfectly happy to go along. The White House simply saved him the trouble of doing it himself. But he’s going to be blamed by liberals if a plan emerges that pleases no one but the health industry, while Obama will have remained above the fray. The industry will know who their friends are, of course. They paid good money for them.
Update: The White House told Sherrod Brown that there was no deal with Pharma. I wonder where Pelosi got the idea there might have been when she talked to Ezra back in July?
The gasbags spent the entire day talking about the new polls which have Obama at anywhere between a 50 and 58 percent approval rating. They all seem to think he’s toast, although David Gergen did mention that such a characterization means that people have been misreading polls since the beginning of time.
But in all the discussion of polls and how much people loathe and despise the idea that sick people should be able to get health care, nobody mentioned this:
Forty-one percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday say they favor the war in Afghanistan — down 9 points from May, when CNN polling suggested that half of the public supported the war.
Fifty-four percent say they oppose the war in Afghanistan, up 6 points from May.
“Afghanistan is almost certainly the Obama policy that Republicans like the most,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “Nearly two-thirds of Republicans support the war in Afghanistan. Three-quarters of Democrats oppose the war.”
I realize that it’s not the central issue at the moment, but it still seems like something worth mentioning.
Tampa, Florida – Angry protesters and strong supporters are clashing inside and all around a health care reform town hall meeting in Downtown Tampa. The meeting which was scheduled to begin at 6:00 at the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County drew hundreds of people who quickly began to overwhelm staff and event organizers at the front entrance.
As the building filled to capacity, angry protesters stuck outside began to scream, yell, and chant. At one point, those trying to get inside began banging on windows as Tampa Police officers quickly spread out guarding all entrances.
10 Connects photojournalist Kevin Carlson, currently inside the meeting reports at least one fist fight breaking out inside. Some other journalists remain outside.
Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor and State Representative Betty Reed were hosting the event.
UPDATE 7:13pm
Police on bullhorns are trying to break-up the crowd outside the building on 1002 E. Palm Ave.
Many in the crowd are refusing to go.
UPDATE 7:32pm
The forum has ended early.
I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is the real purpose of these protests. They want Democrats to be scared and cancel their events. They did it in 1994. They did it in 2000. It works.
I’m a little bit surprised that everyone’s so gobsmacked about the right wing’s ability to spread the alarm about Obama’s alleged intention to turn all the old people into Soylent Green. How it became such an article of faith on the right is no mystery: it’s a fundamental part of the Right To Life agenda and it’s been going on for a long time.
How Medicare Was Saved from Rationing — And Why It’s Now in Danger By Burke J. Balch
Editor’s note: Since its inception, the National Right to Life Committee has been equally concerned with protecting older people and people with disabilities from euthanasia as with protecting the unborn from abortion. We have recognized that involuntary denial of lifesaving medical treatment is a form of involuntary euthanasia, and therefore have opposed government rationing of health care. In 1997 and 2003, NRLC successfully fought to amend Medicare by allowing older people the right to use their own money to obtain unrationed care; shockingly, under the new leadership of Congress that right is now at risk. Here’s the background:
Most people are aware that Medicare—the government program that provides health insurance to older people in the United States—faces grave fiscal problems as the baby boom generation ages.
Medicare is financed by payroll taxes, which means that those now working are paying for the health care of those now retired. As the baby boom generation moves from middle into old age, the proportion of the retired population will increase, while the proportion of the working population will decrease. The consequence is that the amount of money available for each Medicare beneficiary, when adjusted for health care inflation, will shrink.
Three alternatives exist. In theory, taxes could be increased dramatically to make up the shortfall. Few knowledgeable observers consider this likely, regardless of which party is in power in Washington.
The second alternative—to put it bluntly but accurately—is rationing. Less money available per senior citizen would mean less treatment, including less of the treatments necessary to prevent death. For want of treatment, many people whose lives could have been saved by medical treatment will perish against their will.
The third alternative is that, as the government contribution decreases, the shortfall is made up by payments from older people themselves, so that their Medicare health insurance premium is financed partly by the government and partly from their own income and savings.
It goes on to promote that last as the best way to insure that the elderly will not be euthanized. Here’s their earlier argument when Bush was pushing his prescription drug plan in 2003:
The news has been full of the Republican proposal to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. What Americans might not realize is that the bill as currently drafted could lead to involuntary euthanasia through the rationing of health care.
Everyone knows pharmaceutical prices continue to skyrocket. Exciting new medicines can treat illnesses that used to have anautomatic death sentence, but these medicines come with such a high price tag that the government can’ t possibly make them available to everyone in the Baby Boom generation without a mammoth tax raise. If drugs are rationed, what chance is there that they will be available to senior citizens?
National Right to Life has consistently sounded the alarm about the dangers of rationing and managed care. In 1997, heeding these concerns, Congress gave older Americans the opportunity to use their own money to join private “fee-for-service” insurance plans. Just as most people set aside money to supplement Social Security when they retire, such insurance plans assure that senior citizens can choose their own doctors and make their own decisions about whether a given treatment is “futile.”
However, the prescription drug benefit in the current draft of Medicare legislation has no such “escape clause” permitting Americans to buy additional drug coverage at their own expense. Although private plans could offer such an unmanaged benefit, they would be at an unfair advantage trying to compete with the 70% subsidy involved in the government’s managed care plan. Individuals purchasing such plans would still be charged for Medicare, effectively a double taxation…
“Older Americans must remain free to spend their own money to save their own lives,” says Jenny Nolan of the medical ethics department of National Right to Life.
I’ll bet many of you didn’t know until now that unless we “allow” the elderly to buy their own health insurance, they will all be euthanized, did you? (And it’s always interesting to see how the concerns of social conservatives always seem to converge with the money folks around the issue of taxes, isn’t it?)
This stuff is as fundamental to the social conservative worldview as abortion is. And everyone should have known that after having watched that Schiavo circus just a few short years ago. Here’s a fairly typical example of what was written at the time:
While many people might accept the idea of planning their own death, in the sense that a “living will” avoids prolonged suffering, the embrace of the Netherlands model by AARP seems to suggest it wants us to move toward embracing government intervention into our lives for the purpose of facilitating of causing our deaths.
The WHO is reformulating a “new ethics” which emphasizes the importance of “economic” resources and the likelihood of success in treating people. Analyst Marguerite Peeters says, “The system of priorities in the new WHO paradigm will necessarily lead to the marginalization of certain people. There will be no available resources for certain ‘categories’ of patients, those deemed less important to public health: the elderly, the handicapped, and perhaps even the members of minority groups.”
It is noteworthy that, 50 years ago, the Nazis were prosecuted for war crimes for their government-sponsored euthanasia program. Now, the Nazi program is being accepted under the cover of “sustainable development.” How can they “sustain” the earth when there are so many people on the planet? The obvious answer is to get rid of some of them, especially those who are sick and elderly or handicapped.
The WHO, under the leadership of AARP favorite Brundtland, the former leader of Norway, implicitly supports this practice.
It is significant that AARP also supported Hillary Clinton’s socialized medicine scheme. Once the health care system has been completely nationalized, it can be easily linked to a global network under the supervision of the U.N.’s WHO, in which the “new ethics” can be used to guide the Social Security and health care systems, including Medicare. In this context, it must be recalled that the WHO played a role in developing Hillary’s original plan.
On the Social Security front, the most likely political outcome is stalemate, with the liberals using the ongoing crisis as a pretext to seize even more government control over the health care system, ration treatments to the elderly, and then eventually implement a government-sponsored euthanasia program to target and eliminate some of the most “nonproductive” and “useless” people. This will “solve” the Social Security “problem” and the government will remain in charge of the system. Taxes will continue to rise and we will live in a full-fledged socialist state. That is, if we live.
They accuse of us being Nazis, and Obama’s got a health care logo that’s right out of Adolf Hitler’s playbook. Now, what are the similarities between the Democrat Party of today and the Nazi Party in Germany? Well, the Nazis were against big business — they hated big business. And of course we all know that they were opposed to Jewish capitalism. They were insanely, irrationally against pollution. They were for two years mandatory voluntary service to Germany. They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working, one of which was the Autobahn. They were against cruelty and vivisection of animals, but in the radical sense of devaluing human life, they banned smoking. They were totally against that. They were for abortion and euthanasia of the undesirables, as we all know, and they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare.
There’s so much inaccurate historical information in that insane rant, it would take a separate post to rebut it. But you know that — and somehow I doubt that his listeners are sticklers for historical accuracy. (If you’d like even more Nazi analogies, read Pat Buchanan’s column from yesterday with the pithy headline, “Say Goodbye Grandma.”)
Betsy McCaughey may have brought the euthanasia subject to the attention of the elite villagers, but the right has been steeped in this stuff for decades. Of course for decades the mainstream media has been telling us that Rush and his ilk are fine fellows, simply entertaining the fringe — there’s nothing to see here and nothing to worry about. Except it isn’t really confined to the fringe, is it? Since the election, we’ve seen the entire Republican caucus genuflect to Rush as if he’s Caligula. Just yesterday the chief Senate Republican negotiator on the health care reform spread this vile euthanasia canard as if were casually discussing the weather:
GRASSLEY: In countries that have government-run health care, just to give you an example, I’ve been told that the brain tumor that Sen. Kennedy has — because he’s 77 years old — would not be treated the way it’s treated in the United States. In other words, he would not get the care he gets here because of his age. In other words, they’d say ‘well he doesn’t have long to live even if he lived another four to five years.’ They’d say ‘well, we gotta spend money on people who can contribute more to economy.’ It’s a little like people saying when somebody gets to be 85 their life is worth less than when they were 35 and you pull the tubes on them.
Again, this is the supposedly good faith negotiator for whom Baucus and Obama are selling health reform down the river in their quixotic attempt to claim bipartisanship. No, Grassley isn’t saying right out that Obama is a Nazi who wants to euthanize all the old people, but he’s validating the dishonest talking points of those who do.
There is an age split on mistrust of this health care plan and there’s a good reason for it. Older folks are probably more mistrustful of Obama, for the sad obvious reasons, but they are also uniquely victimized by misinformation and scare tactics. If any of you out there are dealing with geriatric parents, you know about stuff like this:
I recently became involved in helping my 88 year old Great Aunt , with her estate and personal matters. Last week she asked that I help her balance her check book, in which i noticed she was writing monthly checks to anything and everything that had to do with social security.It seems that she has been receiving petitions and contribution requests from our good friends in Washington DC and not just one or two. I had her save her ‘junk mail’ for one week, equaling a total of 117 envelopes ALL WANTING TO SAVE SOCIAL SECURITY and ALL WANTING A DONATION. When i asked her about this,her explanation was that our government is going to take her social security away and she wont be able to live. Hence the big debate: shes afraid the government will stop her social security check-but giving it back to them in donations.
The elderly are easy prey for all kinds of scare stories and scams from unscrupulous people. And nobody is more unscrupulous than a right winger desperate to obstruct a program or politician they know will be popular and empowering of liberals. Here’s one example from a few years ago, and as far as I know they are still active today. The groups they fronted for certainly are.
I know it’s seems surprising to many that the right is able to mobilize senior citizens against health care reform, but it doesn’t surprise me at all. They’ve been laying the groundwork for this, from dozens of different directions, for decades. The “right to life” people’s ongoing efforts to put euthanasia on the table is just well tilled little piece they are using for this particular moment.
The fundamental architecture of the conservative movement is built on a simple premise: liberals want to take all your money and then kill you or they want to kill you and then take all your money. It’s not really any more complicated than that.
If someone had asked me how to respond to the euthanasia scare I probably would have tried to pre-empt it with something like this: “the Republicans want to interfere in your most private, personal decisions and force terminal patients to be hooked up to machines for years against their will, just like Terry Schiavo.” With their crusading against living wills, it’s has the benefit of being true.
If you don’t put them on the defensive first, they get you every time. They’ve been working it for years —it’s reflex by now.
Earlier today I expressed puzzlement at a post by Dylan Matthews over at The New Republic, not seeing its point. Thanks to Timothy Noah, I think I get it now. Both of them are reacting to Arthur Laffer, the supply-side economist, who in a recent CNN interview said, “If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid, and health care done by the government.” Matthews and Noah take Laffer to be suggesting that Medicare and Medicaid are not currently “done by the government.” Noah writes, “If there is a hell for libertarian poseurs, Laffer has secured himself a berth in it.” I think this is a simple misunderstanding. Laffer seems to me to be saying that Medicare and Medicaid are not run well, and neither will health care in general when the government expands its role in it. “Done by the government,” that is, modifies only “health care,” not “Medicare, Medicaid, and health care.” Laffer could have spoken more precisely, but that doesn’t seem like an offense worth casting someone into Hell for.
Sure, he could mean something that he’s clearly not saying, but it’s usually a better policy to assume that he means what he clearly says. .