Yglesias is the Naive One

Matt Yglesias doesn't agree completely with Dr. Jeffrey Flier's take on the health care bill, which I linked to earlier. Yglesias writes:

Dealing with this will be hard. If the bill Harry Reid unveiled yesterday is signed into law, it will be easier. It will be easier in part because the bill directly tackles the fiscal problem and reduces the deficit. And it will be easier in part because senators and members of congress who are considering additional ideas to improve the situation will have a recent precedent available of legislative success. If the bill is defeated, tackling the problem gets harder. It doesn’t open the door to a broader national conversation in which citizens lose their bias toward the status quo or interest groups lose their desire to fight for the biggest possible slice of pie.

It would be nice if health reform did more to control costs and reform the delivery system than this bill does. But it does something to control costs and it does something to reform the delivery system. And it improves access for millions of people in need. To hold that latter factor hostage to a pie-in-the-sky belief that if the whole thing goes down in flames more radical change will somehow become possible seems to me to exhibit very strange political judgment.

Yglesias calls Flier naive, but I think it is Yglesias who is the naive one. He just assumes that if this bill is passed things will start to get better. But why so much faith in further government intervention, Matt? What evidence do you have that government intervention has done more good than harm since the 1960's? Faith-based conclusions are about as naive as it gets.

Matt also says that it would "exhibit very strange political judgement" if people were to think that the failing of this bill would lead to more radical change. First off, the current bill is not "radical change". This is further socialization of the market. It is not "reform", as every liberal journalist and politician would have you believe.

Radical change would be implementing a more free-market system. I don't think this will happen, at least not for next few years, but stopping this monstrosity would be a start.

Healthcare Legislation = Political Power

Via Greg Mankiw, Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier, Dean of the Harvard Medical School, offers his thoughts on the current healthcare legislation. A snippet:

the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

Now why would our benevolent elected leaders do such a thing? Randall Holcombe has the fairly obvious answer:

The only answer I can think of is politics. They said they were going to pass health care reform, they ran on that platform, and now they are determined to do it despite the widespread recognition that if they succeed the outcome will make the nation worse off.