NYT Gets Health Care Reform Wrong - Again

The New York Times still does not understand what real health care reform means, as evidenced in the Sunday Magazine's cover story. No wonder, though, considering it was written by Matt Bai, who infamously got the revival of the Democratic Party by Howard Dean completely backwards in his 2008 waste of dead trees "The Argument."

Here's Bai in the NYT trying to scare everybody with the worn-out ghosts of 1993:

“HILLARYCARE,” AS OPPONENTS referred to Clinton’s 1993 health care plan, has been ridiculed ever since as the apotheosis of liberal, out-of-control bureaucracy-building. However flawed the politics of the effort may have been, however, the plan itself, weighing in at the size of an urban telephone book, was less a testament to Orwellian ambition than it was to the sheer mind-bending complexity of the issue itself. Few policy aims in American life could involve so many moving parts as designing a new health care structure, which has to involve fundamental changes in how medical providers are paid, how consumers are insured, how businesses pay their employees and even how Americans safeguard their own health. To use a home-improvement metaphor, if welfare reform was like remodeling your kitchen, and if adding the prescription-drug benefit to Medicare was like building a sizable addition onto the back porch, then overhauling the health care system is more like ripping out all the walls of your house and completely reconfiguring the plumbing, the air ducts and the wiring all at once. Each aspect of the job is painfully complex and essential to the whole, and if one piece is poorly conceived, then none of the others may actually work as planned.

Dead wrong. Health care reform - REAL reform - is simple beyond the ken of Villagers like Bai. You don't have to design anything new, you don't have to coordinate a bunch of moving parts, you don't have to do anything except this:
Announce that everybody in the country is now eligible for Medicare. If you'd rather stay with your private insurer, fine. If you want high-quality care at low prices, sign here.

Bai, Harry Reid, the Blue Dogs and the rest of the Villagers insist on re-inventing the wheel from scratch, when there's a ready-to-go Camry sitting right there in front of them.

Meanwhile, Max Baucus, Montana DINO, is using the absence of Ted Kennedy from leadership on health care as an opportunity to prove he can fellate repugs as well as Harry Reid.

What House and Senate leaders don’t agree on, necessarily, is how to get the legislation done. Waxman and Rangel are more than happy to shove a bill down the throats of their Republican colleagues, if need be. That’s why the House forced Senate leaders to accept a provision in the budget that allows health care to pass by “reconciliation” — an arcane budgeting maneuver that would enable Senate Democrats to force through a bill with a simple majority, rather than with the 60 votes needed to forestall a filibuster. But in the Senate, Baucus remains determined to send to the floor a bill with bipartisan support; passing health care reform by reconciliation, he says, would make the new law unsustainable in the long term. This is why Baucus hasn’t yet committed to the idea of a public plan to compete with private insurers. It’s not that he particularly dislikes the policy or that he can’t find enough centrist Democrats who might vote for it. It’s more that Baucus fears the provision will drive away Republicans, making it far less likely that Democrats can pass a bill without resorting to reconciliation. During our conversation in his office, Baucus told me his main goal is to keep Senate Republicans at the negotiating table for as long as he can. “Everything is on the table,” Baucus told me more than once, which is the same theme he’s been hammering home to his Republican colleagues.

Max! Max! Over here! MAAAAAX! Listen up, idiot: even if you gut health care reform and turn it into a record-breaking porker that hands the keys to the Treasury over to the criminal HMOs, the repugs will still - are you listening, Max? - vote against it..

So fuck them, and the Blue Dogs who love them. Let's have a nice, clean, two-line bill that really reforms health care in this country:

Single-payer for everybody. Paid for by outlawing private health insurers and seizing all their assets.

Done. Now, what's this bullshit about giving away carbon credits?

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....