Megan Megan Megan!
Ezra Klein and Ben Domenech (!) both do a fine job of upending Megan McArdle’s widely linked, glibertarian mess of an argument against national health care.
But they leave a few basic things out, which we’ll get to.
Klein accurately breaks down the McArdle position:
Megan has two primary concerns. The first is that national health insurance would succeed in reducing health-care costs, and that would limit the rewards available for medical innovation (drugs, devices, etc), which would in turn reduce medical innovation and prevent future generations from enjoying wonder drugs. “If you worry about global warming,” she writes, “you should worry at least as hard about medical innovation.”
Second, national health care gives elites license “to wrap their claws around every aspect of everyone’s life.” Her primary example is obesity. Megan believes that national health insurance will give the government license to decide that we can never really want a second chocolate eclair. She also believes that the real reason most every epidemiologist in the country is worried about obesity is because they hate, and are disgusted by, poor people.
McArdle’s second point is standard wingnut scare-mongering over a government takeover of our lives — not really worth spending much time on. Suffice to say that Big Insurance already does plenty to penalize that second chocolate eclair, and Domenech credibly fingers Big Pharma as the culprit in our redefining of obesity downward:
As a side note: If you want to understand why in 1998 the medical community suddenly decided that you were overweight at a body mass index of 25 instead of 27.8, taking the WHO view (based on the BMIs of Africa and other developing nations as opposed to the long-held U.S. definition) and suddenly making 30 million Americans ‘fat’, just look at the makeup of the advisory panel — Pharma pushed this decision through, which had the effect of instantly adding millions of customers. But again, it’s nothing personal, just business.
But it is McArdle’s first point that is the glibertarian landmine, that long-standing trope that government provision of goods and services necessarily destroys innovation, which can only ever be fostered by the good old invisible hand. Again, Domenech (!) makes an excellent point about one particular peril with the worship of the market — big profit-making entities are not incentivized to produce better products or products that would benefit more people if doing so would possibly cannibalize or otherwise jeopardize their existing revenue streams.
Now robust competition in the marketplace can force the big companies’ hand in this regard. But there isn’t always robust competition and even if there is, the sheer size of a market leader can often delay the development and penetration of the better product for quite a long time. This is why Microsoft and Oracle continue to sell tons of expensive boxed software products despite the growing realization that hosted ‘software-as-a-service’ or ‘cloud computing’ is probably a cheaper and more efficient application delivery system for most of the market. Cloud computing is almost certain to win out in the end, but probably not before your company sinks a ton of capex into Windows 7 licenses.
McArdle also shows her bias by presenting innovation as purely the development of the next generation of wonder drugs. She rightly notes that innovation is not normally due to some Eureka! moment ‘by a mad scientist somewhere’ but rather ‘more often a matter of small steps towards perfection.’ Which is fine, but McArdle is wholly blind to an entire category of medical innovation — one that many other countries have hands-down achieved in superior ways to the United States, and it is this:
The delivery of better health care to more people at less cost.
Is this not a medical innovation? Is it not, perhaps, the most important medical innovation? Wonder drugs for future generations are great and necessary, but the delivery of better outcomes to people today must be considered equally important, if not more so. And just like the development of wonder drugs, delivering better health care to more people at less cost requires smart people and incremental steps and means-testing and a competitive ecosystem and all the criteria that McArdle might use to characterize ‘innovation’.
It’s a bit ironic, too, that McArdle chooses Wal-Mart’s supply chain management as a shining example of American free-market innovation. Because a centrally administered, regionally operated distribution network that leverages economies of scale and serves a national market is so totally opposite to what a national health care system would look like.
But perhaps McArdle is correct and wonder drugs would disappear if we were to expand national government-run health care beyond the very successful programs we already have for seniors, veterans and, with S-CHIP, children. If so, it seems clear that countries that already have such expansive national health care programs would necessarily have little or nothing in the way of wonder drug production.
A point to McArdle, but as Columbo might say, there’s just one more thing that’s bothering me:
The 50 Largest Drug and Pharmaceutical Companies in the World
By Revenue
Johnson & Johnson USA 53,324
Pfizer USA 48,371
Bayer Germany 44,200
GlaxoSmithKline United Kingdom 42,813
Novartis Switzerland 37,020
Sanofi-Aventis France 35,645
Hoffmann–La Roche Switzerland 33,547
AstraZeneca United Kingdom 26,475
Merck & Co. USA 22,636
Abbott Laboratories USA 22,476
Wyeth USA 20,351
Bristol-Myers Squibb USA 17,914
Eli Lilly and Co. USA 15,691
Amgen USA 14,268
Boehringer Ingelheim Germany 13,284
Schering-Plough USA 10,594
Baxter International USA 10,378
Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Japan 10,284
Genentech USA 9,284
Procter & Gamble USA 8,964
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Israel 8,408
Astellas Pharma Japan 7,850
Daiichi Sankyo Japan 7,158
Novo Nordisk Denmark 6,520
Eisai Japan 5,583
Merck KGaA Germany 5,175
Alcon USA 4,897
Akzo Nobel Netherlands 4,694
UCB Belgium 4,426
Nycomed Switzerland 4,264
Forest Laboratories USA 3,442
Solvay Belgium 3,268
Genzyme USA 3,187
Allergan USA 3,063
Gilead Sciences USA 3,026
CSL Australia 2,788
Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Japan 2,787
Biogen Idec USA 2,683
Bausch & Lomb USA 2,292
Taiho Pharmaceutical Co. Japan 2,069
King Pharmaceuticals USA 1,989
Watson Pharmaceuticals USA 1,979
Mitsubishi Pharma Japan 1,945
Shire United Kingdom 1,797
Cephalon USA 1,764
Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma Japan 1,763
Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Japan 1,698
Shionogi & Co. Japan 1,640
Mylan Laboratories USA 1,612
H. Lundbeck Denmark 1,552
Shorter MEgan:
“Second, national health care gives elites license “to wrap their claws around every aspect of everyone’s life.””
Ok, I’ve figured it out: they’re living in a movie. A thriller, most of the time, although often a morality play and sometimes an action movie.
…I think this idea has real potential.
Or, Shorter Megan: Your health care may suck today, but it will totally rule tomorrow (PS Tomorrow never comes LOL)
I clicked through to the original list and it tells me 53,324 is the 2006 health care revenue. But, 53,324 what?
At least Instapundit aims high and promises that libertarianism will give us robot bodies and spaceships to Mars. I don’t want new wonder pills unless they’re those meal pills they ate on The Jetsons.
SL – beaver pelts, dollars, euros … does it matter?
Looking at a similar list, I’d guess that the unit is millions of US dollars.
Funny, I hadn’t noticed insurance companies putting much money into medical research. Unless executive jets and yachts count as medical research…
And most major medical research is funded by the government already, through grants to academic institutions and private businesses.
Ok, I’ve figured it out: they’re living in a movie. A thriller, most of the time, although often a morality play and sometimes an action movie.
Yeah, I think you’re onto something. Conservative pudits always seem to want their pathetic lives to have some meaning, so they imagine themselves as warriors (or “citizen journalists”) fighting against the rising threat of the Great Big Government Empire. It’s like Harry Potter where the threat grows slowly, except the threat is always growing (so they always have something to bitch about) and the seventh book never comes.
Isn’t much of the R&D towards medical innovation done at universities and financed by taxpayer-funded grants?
By her own lazy reasoning, don’t top-heavy patent protections for large drug companies, HMOs with monopoly power and insurance-for-profit also stifle the drive for innovation?
She’ll make any twisted stupidity of an argument just so long as it feeds her Jane Galt persona.
This is rich. Usually McArdle, in her libertarian way, makes arguments based on pure theory, throwing around assertions about some timeless, abstract world and *proudly* ignoring actual history and human psychology.
Now, when the topic is actual people’s actual health–than which there is nothing more concrete–she has to resort to appealing to The Future. “It’s sad that actual people, today, are suffering, yes, but what about the worse suffering of imaginary people in The (or, maybe, Teh) Future?”
Her comparison of global warming (the discussion of which is based on concrete data today and extrapolating their effects via specific models) and “future innovation” (the discussion of which is based purely on oh-yeah and what -if and other imaginary maybes) proves, once more, that when the committed lads at Fire Megan McArdle or the stalwart Susan of Texas go on and on about how “stupid” she is, they’re right.
She argues that ‘academia’ may be okay at basic research than profit-making drug companies, but that the latter are waaaaay better at actually packaging and distributing those drugs on a mass scale. Domenech (!) says (!!) that (!!!!!!11!) this is pretty much bullshit, that the NIH and academia do develop drugs.
Alcon USA 4,897
Now where have I heard that name before?
Is it a shock that Domenech makes a good point here and there? I just assume he stole it from a better writer.
Will the pharmaceutical companies give back all the money and all the patents created as a part of Federally-funded research? Until they are willing to be pure, I won’t hear this argument.
The taint of government money is already everywhere, and this isn’t going to change if Obamacare is the most socialist, mind-numbing leviathan of a healthcare system Wingnuts can imagine. I can actually imagine that the focus of research will change from erection assistance drugs (two of which were advertised during a recent Rachel Maddow show that focused largely on healthcare) toward things that affect more people in more substantive ways. I won’t argue that erections aren’t important, but it is kind of ironic that this is the public face of big pharma: middle-aged men who have confidence issues but also a pill to fix that. Sounds like a lot of Wingnuts.
She also says in her follow-up post:
But producing drugs does not seem to be the government’s core competence.
Not necessarily so (see Domenech) but even if it were, the government is damn good at BUYING drugs, which one would think she would like as a supposed fan of supply and demand.
State control of police and national defense has seriously stifled research and development in surveillance and military systems.
Also, when I turn on the kitchen faucet, a government bureaucrat carrying forms in triplicate comes out instead of water.
Not necessarily so (see Domenech) but even if it were, the government is damn good at BUYING drugs, which one would think she would like as a supposed fan of supply and demand.
The government would be better at buying drugs, if Medicare could negotiate with the drug companies over price.
acrannymint – absolutely, and that would spur more competition with better results for the consumer, so why don’t the glibertarians love it?
“If you worry about global warming,” she writes, “you should worry at least as hard about medical innovation.”
This is just so stupid. The correlary is that if you’re a climate change denier you should be in favor of single payer.
She also believes that the real reason most every epidemiologist in the country is worried about obesity is because they hate, and are disgusted by, poor people.
I guess wingnuts really do think projection is just something other people do.
Here’s why they don’t love it – because glibs like McArdle are really arguing for artificially protected profit centers for big business, even if (like McArdle) they have internalized that ideology to the extent that they don’t even realize that is what they are arguing for … which is to say that they are often legitimately shocked that people tag them with such bad motives.
For instance, McArdle opens her long anti-national health care opus with this:
I know, most of you have already figured out why I oppose national health care. In a nutshell, I hate the poor and want them to die so that all my rich friends can use their bodies as mulch for their diamond ranches. But y’all keep asking, so here goes the longer explanation.
Ha ha, point to Megan — she ‘gets’ that people see her views as selfish but she is self-deprecatingly humorous about it … so they are obviously wrong. Ha ha!
But here’s a hint for the glibs — when you must repeatedly defuse the impression that you’re a selfish prick, it may be worth examining why this is so rather than playing it off with another joke.
In McArdleland,
(i) Your freedom to choose is directly proportional to the amount of disposable income you have.
(ii) The people with the most money have the greatest say in the operating of the ‘free market’.
(iii) The people with the least power in regards the operating of the market are not allowed to join people in similar circumstances in a democratic organisation, as this interferes with the freedom of the people with the greatest power.
(iv) The people with the greatest power are allowed to join people in similar circumstances in a democratic organisation, as this does not interfere with the freedom of the people with the least power.
(v) The people with the least power are corrupt, irrational, unable to think for themselves, and are prone to aberrant behaviour such as altruism, a commitment to fairness, mutual aid and solidarity.
(vi) The people with the most power are incorrupt, (except when forced by those with the least power) rational, freethinkers, who are not prone to aberrant behaviour such as altruism, a commitment to fairness, mutual aid and solidarity.
(vii) Those with the least power will do everything they can to corrupt the ‘free market’ in their own interests.
(viii) Those with the most power will never do anything they can to corrupt the ‘free market’ in their own interests.
Therefore, those with the most power are good, and those with the least, evil.
Correct?
Pretty much.
A blast from the past:
A comment from a Megan supporter on the existence of actual profit-making drug companies in countries with national health care systems:
jules, people do research in those other companies, and then form companies in the US and get the patent here, to overcharge Americans to maximize their profits and pay for it. Their socialized medicine relies on the American free market and patent system to thrive. If it disappears, goodbye innovation.
This is another pet peeve of mine about this whole debate. Even if the above were true (it’s not) — then why the fuck do Americans have to be the petri dish of capitalism’s experiments run amok? Why do we have to suck it up and accept lower aggregate health care standards so that ‘innovation’ can proceed apace, only to have its fruits sucked up by the dirty commies in other countries?
Why, glibertarians, are you so happy to be the gormless provider of advanced health care to a bunch of moochers?
Because the moochers are underwriting their wingnut welfare, why else?
@PGE:
“If you worry about global warming,” she writes, “you should worry at least as hard about medical innovation.”
This is just so stupid. The correlary is that if you’re a climate change denier you should be in favor of single payer.
I don’t think the logic goes both ways. Mainly because there isn’t any.
I think what Megan needs is a good invisible hand job. Why does anybody even bother to debunk her idiotic jabberings?
How can you rely on a ‘free market and patent system’?
Now call me a crazy Anarchist, but in a ‘free market’ there can’t be a patent system, as a patent is enforced by the state with threats of violence, which implies that the market is not free?
Which leads me to;
(i) Your freedom to choose is directly proportional to the amount of disposable income you have.
pa – because crap like Megan’s gets spread far and wide, and has the potential to seriously derail health care reform, that’s why. See Joe Conason’s latest on Salon about the incredible damage done to health care reform by Betsy McCaughey (the Clinton-era McArdle) with a single article in the New Republic:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/07/31/bill_betsy/index.html
It would be nice to be able to just ignore this kind of crap, but sadly, it’s often necessary to take it seriously.
did you see her last post?
she referenced this organ-farming, technocrat, Randroid:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/07/31/where_drugs_come_from_and_how_once_more_with_a_roll_of_the_eyes.php
he wouldn’t know ANYTHING about the subject, of course, because he’s a dirty dirty pharma researcher.
D.A., I was wondering why the WaPoo comments the other day were full of wingnuts screaming that Obama wanted to euthanize the olds.
It was Betsy McCaughey, accustomed as an 18th century historian to using primary sources, at it again.
Shorter McCurdle: I have excellent health care coverage and anyone who doesn’t should just hang themselves by their bootstraps. Also.
Derek Lowe:
Ummm. . .isn’t this exactly what happened with Vioxx? Merck was trying to see if Cox-2 inhibitors could be useful for colon cancer, which is certainly deadly, and certainly a lot less common than joint and muscle pains. Why didn’t Merck “stand pat”? Because they wanted to make even more money of course.
But of course that isn’t Domenech’s point. The point isn’t that Big Pharma companies (or any company – you don’t have to be a pharma specialist to understand this) don’t create products ‘to make even more money’. The point is that they often don’t create products to make less money — even if those products are likely to help more people.
Companies don’t like to cannibalize from their own profit centers. This is just an obvious reality and it is not limited to Big Pharma, nor do you have to be a 20-year pharma scientist to understand it. Competition can and does force the better products to get made, but that is not always a smooth process, especially when dominant market share is held by a single player or a couple of players with the same investment in an inefficient status quo.
the difference is to which party the unwarranted assumption of malicious intent and motivation is assigned.
Nayagan – you are being cryptic. What are you talking about … spit it out, man!
But here’s a hint for the glibs — when you must repeatedly defuse the impression that you’re a selfish prick, it may be worth examining why this is so…
Or, to use one of their own favorite tropes, they may not be selfish pricks, but what does it say about them that I believe they are?
Under McArdleCare, anesthesia is covered by a blow from a two-by-four to the back of the head.
McArdle will never come out and say what her REAL issue with universal healthcare is: that some “undeserving” might get to go to the doctor and get care they can’t pay for out of their own pocket.
In Libertarian World, the gummint must not be allowed to participate in any markets. This is why a public option just has to be completely different from other economies of scale that exist to McMegan.
Euripides-
Why yes. That is a correct assessment of libertarianism.
Been working for #10 for ~7 yrs
Apologize for the OT, but you’ve just got to head on over to Roy’s and see what the right is outraged over today. It makes “mustardgate” look like the Profumo scandal.
“If you worry about global warming,” she writes, “you should worry at least as hard about medical innovation.”
My greatest worry is that I’m not worrying hard enough, and that I’m wasting my worry on the wrong things.
But, Nom de Plume, Medal of Freedomgate was yesterday.
Oh.
Kenyan President hates crippled black folks and cops too, gate.
Got it!
~
Perhaps the most wonderful thing about McArdle’s over hyped article (other than Klein’s rip on its laughable utter lack of links) is that it is some absolutely devoid of any serious thinking so as to paint the bankruptcy of glibertarian dogma in stark colors.
Although Joseph Stiglitz has been writing about the silliness of the Invisible Hand for years, glibertarian dogma requires an absolute faith in the miraculous magic of the Invisible Hand to make its scientific argument.
The beauty of McArdle’s argument is that for it to be at all credible it makes the 2nd and easily and repeatedly refuted Scary Guberment point. Depending upon the scare tactic of be very afraid! is the common thread that holds all the conflicted constituencies of the right together.
Whether you should be afraid of Islam or Socialized Medicine, or Market Regulation, Minorities, or Black Presidents without a Long Form BC, or ….. the key point is BE AFRAID.
And thus the lazy, the stupid and the superstitious can be led by their noses by the rich and powerful.
And what could possibly change this? Two things. Available affordable health care and science based education.
The battle of Health Insurance reform with a strong public option is every bit as important to the future of this nation as was the Civil Rights legislation of the 60’s and the Civil War. And it should surprise no one that the plantation owners of the southeast continue to fight against progress.
Crowley arrested Gates AGAIN, on the White House steps?
BREAKING Update to my previous….. BE AFRAID also too 😉 of CARS, a.k.a. Cash for Clunkers.
Actually, what she needs is a good VISIBLE hand (or better still, two) wrapped firmly around her throat, shaking some sense into her.
MikeBoyScout:
You really nailed this for me. It’s something I already knew but didn’t know I knew it.
Every Republican and libertarian argument is explicitly about “dangers.”
From commies to immigrants to “socialism” to government-running-your-
medical-life to the “death tax” to Saddam/mushroom clouds, etc., etc.
Which is to say, it’s about what might happen (to you, the poor voter/victim) in an indeterminate future unless you empower the Repub/lib. to ward it off now.
In thus directing their targets’ attention to the scary but theoretical threat, they try (and often succeed in) distracting the target from their actual situation now, here, today, now, at this point in time, now.
LIberals, for better or worse, say, “Here’s a problem. Let’s fix it and maybe we can assure that it won’t be as bad a problem in the future.”
These assholes say, “We must never do X, or we must always do Y, or there will be terrible things to come in the future.”
It really is a matter of hope vs. fear. When all one asks is that people look at their daily reality (and the daily reality of those who manipulate them).
For them, “the politics of fear” IS politics. That’s all they have.
Kenyan President hates crippled black folks and cops too, gate.
And then I go over to TBogg’s, and it seems that Gateway Pundit and his readers are all drowning in urine over the Secret Service carrying guns, because that’s a totally new thing and has never been done before.
It cannot be said enough: it is literally impossible to underestimate them.
Mr. Wonderful, the politics of fear is fundamentally about the fear of self government through Democracy because Democratic self government means the end to privileged rule and privileged rule is exactly what conservatives seek to conserve.
Apparently the photo of Obama allowing the two former antagonists a moment of courtesy toward one another was a monumental gaffe.
According to the right wing, after the beer summit to bring to conflicting parties together, Obama should have rushed Crowley, shoved him aside, and yellow, “Get your White Devil hands offa him, you honky muthafucka!”
Or he should have exhibited more gracious courtesy, like this.
And according to the right wing, Gates’ daughter Elizabeth is an arrogant, haughty, prideful, bitchy, condescending racist because she favors her father over the cop who handcuffed him, rather than acknowledge the deference decent citizens must pay to authorities.
Nownow, let’s not get caught up in giving Ezra any credit here. Don’t forget he spent years promoting Megan’s output as something other than the work of a talentless hack.
He’s just seen the way things are now, and he’s trying to cover his ass. The sad part is it will probably work and he’ll now be known as a critic of her.
ab – yeah, though it was actually more painful to give Domenech credit.
a different brad said,
August 1, 2009 at 20:22
Nownow, let’s not get caught up in giving Ezra any credit here. Don’t forget he spent years promoting Megan’s output as something other than the work of a talentless hack.
He’s just seen the way things are now, and he’s trying to cover his ass. The sad part is it will probably work and he’ll now be known as a critic of her.
(Dispenses with Better than Ezra pun, you’ll all just have to imagine it.)
Bob S. gets all over E. Klein’s behind on a regular basis.
Actually, what she needs is a good VISIBLE hand (or better still, two) wrapped firmly around her throat, shaking some sense into her.
What if she doesn’t have any sense to begin with? It’s like shaking a martini that doesn’t include gin.
I think what Megan needs is a good invisible hand job.
I like the idea of her being given the visible finger, myself. Repeatedly. By every single person she meets.
Shackleford: according to the Onion, Crowley can’t help himself.
Fuckin’ the Onion stealing my bit.
Here’s Ezra being a massive tool with/for Megan.
Never trust a careerist.
She went to college. She went to business school, although she charmingly calls it “grad school”. So how is it that she can write something this fucking stupid? I guess her salary depends on her not understanding what she’s writing about.
Maybe it was a matter of jurisdiction, but Crowley was in Obama’s house and it was a perfect opportunity to demand proof that he belonged there. Maybe he forgot to bring his handcuffs.
i wish someone would come up with a medical innovation that would cure the megan mccurdles of this world.
Fuck Megan’s latest rake in the face. There’s a new Young Cons song!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG6nUbvyw-E&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Edailykos%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded
Word dawgs. G to the O to the P.
What does the Office of Extramural Research at NIH do, if not hand out grants to foster medical research?
The clues in the name, momus.
They pay the feckless to do something arty like painting on walls in blackity black neighbourhoods, depicting things like Officer Crowley or gay abortions and the like.
DOWN WITH THE EXTRAMURALS!!!ONE!!
So, that Cons song. I got through about one minute. I see they found someone who could dance. Also, I see they still can’t flesh out a single idea for more than two lines.
Ignoring the non-rhyme there, and ignoring the non-rhythm as well, they don’t develop this idea. They don’t explain it. They don’t even give a relevant example. They just say it, and then move on to say other stuff. And the whole song (or at least as far as I got before I realized I had better things to do, like eat a bucket of rusty nails) is like that. Just assertion after assertion, with no evidence of actual thought.
So, it’s just like the old Young Cons song. But with a dancing guy.
like eat a bucket of rusty nails
Your procedure is incorrect. I believe you’re supposed to drink out of that bucket.
Boy, that takes me back to some of my vacation trips to the Olympic Peninsula! All the water over there is like that, because all the land is fresh basalt. Watching the rust drip out of the walls in every road cut is really entertaining.
Then of course, if you go to a resort like La Push in the summer, when it hasn’t rained a lot lately, you get salt working its way back into the water table. Good times….
Sorry, it’s free association day today. I’m still a little heat-struck from our all-time record high on Wednesday. Global-warming deniers can kiss my fire-engine-red butt!
I still waiting for the righties to figure out that First Brother B. Hussein X is straight rollin’ out the Plan, ‘cept we’re callin’ it Public Option and Beer Summit :
Points 6 and 7:
# WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR All BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE.
We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventive medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give all Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide our selves with proper medical attention and care.
# WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, All OPPRESSED PEOPLE INSIDE THE UNITED STATES.
We believe that the racist and fascist government of the United States uses its domestic enforcement agencies to carry out its program of oppression against black people, other people of color and poor people inside the united States. We believe it is our right, therefore, to defend ourselves against such armed forces and that all Black and oppressed people should be armed for self defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces.
Do these people really not understand that the UK, for instance, has a private health service as well as the NHS? Yes, NICE “rations” treatments, but BUPA doesn’t. You can have as many new hips as you can pay for, and you can have them right now. It’s not like the UK actually is socialist. We haven’t abandoned money.
Also, your list says it all. Somehow GSK makes money, even in the socialist dystopia that is the UK.
And when Megan is pissing on about herceptin, maybe she should remind herself that if a poor woman gets breast cancer in the UK, she gets treatment. If she gets it in the States, she gets the choice of death or bankruptcy.
I guess we can’t currently cure septic-inducing infections resulting from unnecessary C-sections. So McMegan has a point.
Something the wingnuts and glibertarians are ignoring is how the costs of having children (something around 5% of women have a child in the US each year) could be dramatically reduced. The vast majority of births do not need to take place in a hospital. The kind of reform I have in mind would require dramatic societal shifts, but these are exciting times we live in, amirite?
Shorter Megan:
Leave the Single Payer, take the cannoli.
Meanwhile, there’s a reason why Canadians picked Tommy Douglas as their Greatest Canadian…a concept, I’m told, that glibertarians and flibbertigibbertarians just don’t get.
Glad we have so few of THEM up here, is all I can say.
Thanks for the link, St. Bina.
T. Douglas was one hell of a guy.
He took his final and most controversial stand during the October Crisis of 1970, when he voted against the implementation of the War Measures Act in Quebec. The move was devastating to his popularity at the time, but he would be heralded years later for sticking by his principles of civil liberty.
That’s what we need more of.
~
I thought money was merely tokens representing units of labour. Uh oh. That sounds disturbingly socialist.
Someone commenting on Megan’s magnum opiate of Randinista froth brought up this illuminating link to make a point: the spirochete-riddled whorehouse that is “journalism” in America has a non-trivial vested interest in servicing the Not-So-Invisible Hand that keeps shelling out major wampum to their employers, so nobody need be shocked when they put their legs in the air on cue & commence moaning the “Ohh yeah, free markets, baby, ahh yeah, oooh, your profits are so-o-o-o BIG” script without any prompting – it’s become second nature to them by now.
Reluctantly agree – Megan & her fellow ideology-pimping dipshits in academe are, first & foremost, intellectual vampires: they can’t sow their havoc unless & until they’re invited into a debate … & sad to say, most of us are inclined to be generous when it comes to invitations to the brainstorm-buffet, whether out of naivete, a bias toward upholding freedom of thought at any cost, or simple good will, & the bottom-feeders know it.
tl;dr – Megan is full of POOPY — Rx: 2×4 enema.
Uh, wait, everybody’s missing the real issue with what’s-her-face’s sad piece of whatever. No it’s not that she gets paid way more than probably everybody here to write such simplistic stupid=ass bullshit–though yeah that pisses me the fuck off. But do you see what she’s doing here, she’s arguing against National F’in Health Care, as if that’ s what the big debate is about. I mean did Obama issue a proclamation closing down all the insurance companies and instituting ooga booga socialistic coverage for all and I missed it? otherwise, Megan baby is following the same wingnut script that sadly seems to be working (surprise!) in which the reform is painted as a government takeover of healthcare, when of course it’s nothing of the sort. hell the dems can’t even get their own party to agree on a public OPTION let alone even consider national health care! So why are we letting them frame the issue the way they want to-AGAIN?
I thought money was merely tokens representing units of labour. Uh oh. That sounds disturbingly socialist.
The Standard Value Unit is recognized throughout the Oikumene, but you’d better have a good deal of strakh if you want to get anything on Sirene.
I hear this Ensure is an excellent product.
The sense of entitlement that drips from McCardle and other out of touch elites bugs me.
Sorry to get all crazy and shit.
I hear this Ensure is an excellent product.
chocolate Ensure + vodka + Kalhua = Mocha Cobag
“So why are we letting them frame the issue the way they want to-AGAIN?”
You answered your own question a bit earlier:
Message discipline was never the left’s strong suit.
The left is Democrats?
My latest poison dart frog just died half-heartedly and with all the fatalistic crap going on here a glowing phony poison dart frog story would make my week. I don’t know how he got stuck in that can. My question is to Vishnu… Why did it have to be my Wad?
The left is Democrats?
With the descent of the republicans into madness (starting with Goldwater and perfected with W), the Democrats are all that’s left.
MEgan opened this piece of shit column with a “joke”:
Lawls. We all think MEgan is a horrible, horrible monster when really she’s just…
Two posts back she’s arguing that kicking the homeless out of shelters is a good thing.
A week ago she used the guy who got busted in the organ-harvesting thing as an example of why we should be allowed to sell organs.
Hey MEgan, we assume you oppose health care reform because of your hatred for the poor – well that assumption is based on your own writing. If you don’t want people to think that you are a horrible monster, you could stop espousing horrific and monstrous views.
I’ve reached the point on medical reform long ago where I’ve stopped listening to arguments. The point is so well settled at this point, it’s like arguing against evolution or global warming. Anyone who doesn’t agree with you a fucking loon, and having a point-by-point discussion about it is pointless.
That said, I don’t know ANYTHING about cloud computing and will be interested to hear more about the future of Microsoft. Also, is Windows 7 going to suck? Everyone I’ve talked to is cautiously optimistic.
The greatest advances in health in history have not been made by new drugs or new surgical techniques/technologies. Creating clean water to drink has saved more lives and prolonged them longer and made them healthier than all other health care measures ever devised combined, and even today could do so if provided to the entire world rather than just the developed one. Countless millions more lives would be saved and enhanced each year by simply provided good maternal and infant nutrition programs. Even now in our “advanced” world we know that the way to being healthier will not come from new wonder drugs but from altering the way we live and how we get our water and food. We just don’t like that as the answer. This “stifling technology” argument against universal, publicly funded health care is the consummate straw man.
digitus- and how about cutting corn subsidies so we can affordably balance our diets?
Uh-oh, inkadu. I just browsed the unimpeachable knowledge base that is Wikipedia, and I am afraid that cloud computing is the socialized medicine of the intertubez, and that Megan McArdle will hate it. Or maybe she will love it. I didn’t totally understand the article. Now I must go back and freakin study the subject. Jeepers.
Great article until the Microsoft/Oracle (Oracle still exists?) rant. When a cloud oriented operating system starts to exist then you might have an argument. * Until then, STFU. Apples and oranges.
* That is not to say that I am against the cloud computing / SAS paradigm. It’s just that it’s nothing new. It is the 21st century equivelent of time sharing systems and mainframes with dumb terminals. It has its place and it’s useful, but it will never replace all locally installed software because not all software lends itself to the “cloud” paradigm. Also, who buys boxed copies of Windows? If you have a company over zero employees, you can buy and download Microsoft products via eopen/open license systems.