To the Editor:
The rumor mill has it that the health insurance lobby has deemed universal health care a done deal as long as the public option is taken off the table. But Paul Krugman is right. The Obama administration should say no and gird for a fight.
Conservatives consider government too incompetent to run anything, and would outsource all public administration to the private sector given the chance. But these same conservatives declare government-sponsored health insurance to pose unfair competition with private insurers. If such a government enterprise would be, by its nature, inefficient and incompetently administered, how could it be unfair competition and a threat to private enterprise? Which is it?
Is government an inefficient monolith, or a more effective conduit of health care for the American people? Conservatives cannot have it both ways.
Tom Predhome
Brooklyn, May 11, 2009
Note from KBJ: I don't know a single conservative who "consider[s] government too incompetent to run anything." Not even libertarians hold such a preposterous view. What libertarians say is not that government is incompetent to run anything but that it has no business running anything. Can you say "straw-person argument"?
