Two pieces in the LA Times today demonstrate why conservatives are increasingly losing the healthcare argument. First up is Michael Tanner of Cato, a guy who’s practically an op-ed machine on the subject of healthcare, and right up front he says this about healthcare in America: “It costs too much. Too many people lack health insurance. And quality can be uneven.” 
And he admits that “supporters of the free market” — like him — “have been remiss in positing viable alternatives.”
A promising start! But his solution is bizarre:
There are two key components to any free-market healthcare reform. First, we need to move away from a system dominated by employer-provided health insurance….Changing from employer-provided to individually purchased insurance requires changing the tax treatment of health insurance….For tax purposes, employer-provided insurance should be treated as taxable income.
….The other part of effective healthcare reform involves increasing competition among both insurers and health providers. Current regulations establish monopolies and cartels in both industries.
These may or may not be good ideas. They might or might not reduce the cost of healthcare. That much is at least debatable. But they’d do nothing to reduce the number of people who lack health insurance. Just the opposite, in fact. If we took his advice, employers would drop health insurance like hot coals and it’s a dead certainty that anybody who’s over the age of 50 or has a previous history of anything at all would be unable to get replacement coverage in the individual market. This isn’t debatable at all. So why does Tanner think any ordinary middle-aged, middle-class op-ed reader is going to support a plan that increases the odds that they’ll have no health insurance in the future? That doesn’t make much sense.
But at least Tanner isn’t crazy. Unpersuasive, maybe, but not crazy. Charlotte Allen, conversely, thinks that in order to free up some much needed healthcare cash, Barack Obama wants to take all our old people and set them adrift on ice floes to die. Do you think I’m engaged in some bloggy exaggeration for rhetorical effect? Let’s roll the tape:
The Eskimos used to set their elderly and sickly adrift on the ice or otherwise abandon them during times of scarcity, and that, metaphorically speaking, is what Obama would like us all to start doing.
….The scarcity of resources to pay for expensive medical procedures will only increase under a plan to extend medical benefits at federal expense to the 47 million Americans who lack health insurance. So why not save billions of dollars by killing off our own unproductive oldsters and terminal patients, or — since we aren’t likely to do that outright in this, the 21st century — why not simply ensure that they die faster by denying them costly medical care?
The rest of the piece is a weird Soylent Greenish hodgepodge of scaremongering about comparative effectiveness research, fear of jackbooted government bureaucrats pulling the plug on grandma, and a revival of zombie “No Exit” agitprop last seen in 1994. Allen barely even pretends there’s any real evidence for this stuff — mainly because there isn’t any, I suppose — so instead she just riffs hysterically about what Obama “seems” to believe about how to reform healthcare. Most weirdly of all, though, at the end of the piece the conservative Charlotte Allen herself seems to suggest that Medicare should be funded with infinite amounts of money and there should never be any restriction on how it’s spent. Either that or she doesn’t realize that Medicare is the way most old people in America get medical care. Or that Medicare is a government program. Or something. I can’t really make sense out of it.
Better conservatives, please. These two are hopeless.
