This week, The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin and The Daily Caller's Mickey Kaus are all over the political map figuratively, conversationally, and literally. They debate the issues of the day so you don't have to. This week, they parse the polls, the importance of winning Hispanics, gays and Grennel, China, the a Kaus-Rubin bet.
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Jul '10
Re: Set In Stone
Is this loaded on iTunes? It hasn't downloaded on the Super Feed yet for me.
Edited on May 5, 2012 at 4:56amRe: Set In Stone
It's on iTunes (subscribe here) but you're right, it is not showing up in the Super Feed. We'll look into it. Thanks for the heads up.
Sep '10
Re: Set In Stone
The only possible way of ensuring that people get the medical treatments they need is to get government out of the charity business. Doesn't work for two reasons: one, professionalization has led to too much money going to bureaucracy (paperwork to satisfy need requirements) and administration (salaries for multi-levels of people overseeing the system, which results in much less aid actually reaching those for whom the system reportedly was designed); and, two, government programs cannot treat people as individuals or have any expectation of them—except for negative ones. This is why centralized, one-size-must-fit-all approaches never solve social problems but make them bigger and bigger and thus more difficult as time goes by, despite everyone having had the best of intentions. ... Also, typical Robert Wright argument concerning China. Same guy who on BhTV with Mickey indicated, apparently channeling Orszag, that the system cannot afford extremely expensive cancer treatments (never mind that such costs decline with use over time) and, anyway, think of how many African children could be helped with that money. Absolutely breathtaking exemplar of everything Jonah Goldberg writes.
Oct '10
Re: Set In Stone
That's not really the debate, though. Access to healthcare is not a an issue of charity--the vast majority of American citizens can, and often do, pay for their own healthcare. That the government intervenes in charitable ways is a fairly small issue compared to the larger question of how healthcare should be structured in the first place.
It's important to articulate and win that larger question, not whether the government should subsidize healthcare for the poor (which is actually the least damaging and most effective form of poverty assistance, and in my opinion does not deserve to be in the same category as traditional welfare; after all, private insurance plans almost never "have any expectation of them [people]" either).
Not that I'm defending Medicaid, of course; that's a pretty botched program. I just think the general principle of government charity in the realm of healthcare is sound, and even a number of red states embrace this.
Edited on May 8, 2012 at 9:07pmOct '10
Re: Set In Stone
Ah, not that the government should directly provide healthcare. The policies I like are things like means-tested tax credits, premiums subsidies, etc; again, Medicaid is not how this should be done.