Health Care Links

Ezra Klein says Chuck Schumer’s compromise public option plan, created in concert with Max Baucus, separates the insurance industry’s main arguments that (a) the public option will be worse for you and will take away your freedom of choice by preventing the insurance companies from competing with it and (b) the public option will compete unfairly with the insurance industry, threatening their profits.

(Note: The public plan is NOT single payer, which has been excluded thus far from the discussions in the Senate Finance Committee, as noted previously.)

Klein also reports that Chuck Schumer forced the Senate Finance Committee roundtable to address the public plan, which he defended bluntly.

Matthew Yglesias foresees Congress killing health care reform by expressing support for it publicly while opposing every reasonable way of paying for it. I worry about the same thing, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that I keep blogging about the issue. Psychohistorians take note. ;-)

He also relates that the GOP claims that Obama isn’t doing enough to compromise, but refuses (surprise) to offer anything of their own, in this case in re health care reform. I know—I was so shocked I had to sit down. ;-)

Moving from politics to policy: Since there is NO correlation between levels of health care spending and levels of improvement in public health in the U.S., Yglesias argues we should focus not on setting a specific level of spending, but on health care outcomes, in terms of increased efforts at prevention and “lifestyle issues.”

They May Speak English, But We're Still 'The Other'

Quoting an unnamed government source, Spencer Ackerman notes:

The official believes that U.S. diplomats in Pakistan accept Pakistani claims of maximal warfighting efforts at face value: “They don’t speak Urdu, they don’t speak Pashto, and they eat it all up.”

Matthew Yglesias responds:

This sort of thing is, in my view, really the achilles heel of the American imperial project. The economic and military might of the United States gives us enormous power to influence events in distant lands. But having a lot of ability to influence events is unlikely to achieve anything useful unless you actually understand what’s happening...Note that during the FDR and Truman years, American elites were generally more familiar with Europe than European elites were with the United States. I think that’s an important element in understanding why the institution-building of that era largely worked.

I agree that asymmetrical information was a significant advantage to the U.S. in rebuilding Europe, post-WW II, but I don’t think it’s the most important, by any means. To leave it at that is to leave the impression that, regardless whether the object of institution-building efforts has been, as was the case with Europe, closely tied culturally, politically and economically with the U.S., or, completely devastated by a war culminating in the use of nuclear weapons, was subsequently controlled by direct U.S. military rule (Japan), is irrelevant to the probabilities of a successful outcome. Apologists for imperialism like Niall Ferguson overlook the fact that the post-WW II conditions enabling successful U.S.-led reconstruction were sui generis. The history of imperialism is replete with examples of societies resisting, in any way available, the efforts by external powers with whom those societies had little or no prior contact, influence or mutually perceived self-interest. It is not merely a matter of information. I think Yglesias overlooks the importance of the perception on the receiving end that the life of a given country and its people are being altered more or less arbitrarily by some alien external force. And whether the rulers of a given country speak English or not, we are still perceived, as imperial powers have always been, as The Other. Louis Coser famously theorized that externally generated force leads to in-group cohesion. History provides us with endless examples reinforcing that observation. I think we overlook them at our peril. To put it another way, "the achilles heel of the American imperial project" is--imperialism.

Re: Zbig Speak, You Listen

In re Matthew Yglesias’s comments about Zbigniew Brzezinski’s comparison between the arguments by supporters of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Iraq, see my post on Matt’s blog here.