posted by Winston Smith at
12:03 PM
Friday, September 11, 2009
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3 Comments:
I suspect he is. Deficit fundamentalism is like any other fundamentalism, in that it distracts from the real question of what the right thing to do actually is. Maybe the House bill that Brooks mentions is the best health care plan; if so, we shouldn't throw it out just because it adds to the deficit in the short term. The moral imperative to extend health care to all citizens trumps financial considerations. If nothing else, we can find other cuts to make to square things up; there's no reason to think that requiring every single bill to be budget neutral is the best way to ensure that we don't increase the budget, but that probably is a good way to deal the death of a thousand cuts to a lot of important social programs.
Another criticism might be illuminating as well: http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2009/09/obama_sound_and_fury_signifyin.php
The most distorting thing about the discussion of deficit spending in the context of the healthcare debate is how we're supposed to just ignore all those other massive costs that we as consumers swallow on a daily basis from the current system (such as increased premiums, lower wages, higher decuctibles, co-pays, exclusions etc.), and how, for the typical American, overall costs would be lower under a single-payer system since he or she would be likely to pay a lot less in additional taxes to help fund it than they currently pay in aggregate for the aforementioned list.
The argument comes down to whether the cost of insuring everybody should be based on ability to pay (since the wealthier have a smaller marginal utitlity of money, they pay, in theory, progressively more in taxes) or whether it should be borne based on the need for care.
Nobody has yet given me a good reason why health care should be considered a commodity rather than, say a public good like defense, which we all benefit from but which is funded based on personal income taxes which are, at least in theory, progressive.
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