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JD| 10.15.12 @ 2:15PM
AmSpec should have a blogger, and Ross would be a fine nominee, dedicated to posting every Paul Krugman column along with a response.
Here's the latest from Krugman:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10.....inion&_r=0
In addition to the usual tripe about how not giving someone something for free equates to "depriving" them, Krugman stubbornly clings to the assertion that it is lack of health insurance that kills people, not, you know, whatever they die from. I posted the following response, which the NYT will, as usual, prevent from seeing the light of day on their site:
The “logic” Krugman uses to suggest that lack of health insurance kills people and giving everyone health insurance should be our top priority could also be used to suggest that everyone who dies in a self-caused car accident could be saved if the government gave us all chauffeurs, so the government should do that.
At no point will the Krugmans of the world ask how many people die of want because their policies have decreased the wealth and productivity of the world in the name of redistribution. "Death by Ideology", indeed!
Ross Kaminsky| 10.15.12 @ 2:35PM
JD, on the one hand, I like the idea of refuting everything Krugman says. On the other hand, it would mean I'd have to read everything he writes. I don't think my health insurance coverage for mental disorders is good enough to take that risk.
JD| 10.15.12 @ 3:07PM
To many on the Left, he represents an unrefuted Truth, and so long as he is not refuted, they have no reason to consider alternatives to his beliefs.
I admit that few Leftists (and none who are open to discussion) frequent this site, and that the electorate tires of campaigns which dwell on the wrongness of the opponent instead of the rightness of self.
That said, we benefit tremendously from being prepared to answer the strongest of our enemies, and this site would do the Right a favor by preparing it. Nothing enables a Leftist to dismiss us faster than being unaware of their best arguments. We who face nothing but straw men from our enemies shouldn't expose ourselves to the risk of being hypocrites.
Occam's Tool| 10.15.12 @ 7:15PM
Ross, I was a Permanent Resident of New Zealand for about a year, covered under AND a senior medical consultant for, their NHS, which is modelled (and staffed mostly by doctors trained under) Britain's NHS.
A more gormless group of idiots running a less spectacular health system would be hard to come by. Or, to put it another way, Owensboro, KY had more child/adolescent psychiatric inpatient beds (with a catchment area of 250,000) than New Zealand had as a country (catchment area, 4 million). The more heavily populated North island had under 20 total psychiatric adolescent beds with NONE for children under 10. The South Island has a smaller population than the North.
Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. And that's just in my specialty. The Capital of the country (and 2nd or 3rd largest city, I forget if Christchurch is bigger) Wellington, had NO pediatric oncologists when I was there. Population 400,000, no child cancer specialists.
I practiced there in 2007. (Late 2006-Dec 28, 2007)
buckeyeman| 10.16.12 @ 12:05PM
There is a seldom stated fundamental truth about healthcare. It is that there is no possible way our society can provide top-tier healthcare for all who need or want it. This wasn't the case a hundred years ago because there simply wasn't much healthcare available to anyone, rich or poor. For the last fifty years or so we have been pretending that we can provide healthcare for all by borrowing from the future. Most of us now realize that that dance is almost over.
What we need is a sober discussion of what the future of healthcare OUGHT to look like. I suspect that even the most conservative among us don't want to see a ten year old girl die from a ruptured appendix because her family has no insurance. Neither can we afford to pay for the fourth bone marrow transplant in a diminishingly small hope of curing a malignancy.
My view is that we should return healthcare to the states with NO federal involvement. Kinda like the old days with the county/charity hospital system. Acute life-threatening health crises would be treated (they always were, btw) but individuals and families would be responsible for routine healthcare.
Stan Redmond| 10.16.12 @ 2:46PM
A simple 4 letter word (according to Biden) for Krugman's nonsense of killing people with no insurance.
DDT
rightasrain| 10.15.12 @ 3:11PM
I recently attended a speech by a doctor who talked extensively about Obamacare and the Liverpool Care Pathway. This state sponsored euthanasia accounts for 30% of the deaths in UK hospitals. Average time of death is 33 hours. The doctor related stories of elderly patients being admitted to the hospital on the weekend and started on the LCP without even notifying their attending physician.
Butch| 10.15.12 @ 3:28PM
How long has british health care been socialized. One generation? Two? What frightens me about socialized medicine is the speed of the devolution of the attitudes of the "caregivers" toward the paients. Instead of viewing the patient as someone in need of professional theraputic treatment, these bureaucrats seem to view patients through the lenses of DMV employees: as irksome jerks clamoring to get their drivers licenses renewed and causing them to have to work.
To JD: NR online had a "KTS" feature for quite a while: Krugman Truth Squad. They dropped it after a while, probably for the same reasons Ross gave you.
JD| 10.15.12 @ 4:18PM
I'm aware of that, but I'm more aware of its discontinuation.
Butch| 10.15.12 @ 5:29PM
Oh, I agree! Debunking Krugman is a full-time job. I wouldn't want it either: just as I can't stand to listen to Obama, I can't stand to read Krugman. I prefer to know what he wrote while it's being debunked for me.
JD| 10.15.12 @ 5:46PM
Nonsense. It took me far less time to write my italicized response above than it took him to produce the original drivel. And I do my own debunking, thank you very much!
I'd just like to see some discussion started here.
Occam's Tool| 10.15.12 @ 7:20PM
Actually, Butch, I got stigmatized by my colleagues in NZ for wanting to see patients---they spent their time trying to figure out ways to call primary care guys to keep their clinics empty.
I also got annoyed by them when they would tell me how to prescribe medications I gave lectures on in the States (I, of course, was correct---I'm UCLA trained, and none of them trained at Maudsley, the only decent teaching psychiatric hospital in Britain). I thought they were blithering nincompoops by the end, and it took a few months to regain my edge when I moved back to the States.
They practice, even their best, 15-20 years behind the US. It's why American MDs can practice in Britain without going through British training residency, and British physicians cannot practice here UNLESS they redo their residency.
JD| 10.15.12 @ 5:53PM
I just read a fascinating comment post by an idiot on the WSJ Washington Wire. It's Leftist insanity, but of a type I've never heard before. It's so unique I want to discuss it. Anyone else? And does anyone know where it comes from? I can't imagine this anonymous poster invented it himself.
The drivel:
Because of how our financial system is designed the economy has to grow or collapse. The growth may or may not provide employment, meet real needs, or reduce poverty. The primary reason that the economy must grow or collapse is the demand of the banking system for its pound of flesh.
Because the bookkeeping entry a bank makes when it issues a loan creates only the principal, the economy must grow fast enough to generate sufficient demand for loans in order to create the money required to make the interest payments. Otherwise debts go into default and the financial system and the economy collapse.
The demand for the eventual repayment with interest of nearly every dollar in circulation virtually assures that the economy will fail unless the GDP and income inequality are constantly growing. If you are a Wall Street banker competing for points in the power game, it does not get sweeter than this.
JD| 10.15.12 @ 5:57PM
Unfortunately, for the rest of us, this demand for perpetual growth simply to keep the bankers happy results in a serious distortion of priorities. To avoid an economic collapse, policymakers make their choices based not on what will maximize the well-being of all, but on what will generate the greatest financial return to investors to motivate them to take out new loans so enough money will be in circulation to pay the interest due to bankers on the loans already outstanding. The result is ever-increasing debt and the accelerating destruction of the natural environment and the human social fabric.
It is illogical and deeply destructive to design an economic system in a way that creates an artificial demand for perpetual growth on a finite planet. Even more pernicious is that the growth must be achieved in ways that continuously improve the financial position of the already rich relative to everyone else.
Ok. Wow.
First off, we can see that this person really, really hates banks and blames them for all of our troubles. He reaches, even by the standards of his warped logic, to throw blame for income inequality in there, even though it doesn't really fit. At the end it becomes sort of a standard rant against short-sightedness motivated by "greed", but I'm more interested in the beginning. He seems to blame the concept of interest for financial insolvency, suggesting that charging interest needs to be banned.
JD| 10.15.12 @ 6:12PM
My first thought was to jokingly accuse him of being Muslim, since they believe interest is wrong. I could also launch into a standard "you think banks add no value, but managing, securing, and insuring money is actually substantial value for which payment is deserved" rant, alongside a "how can banks make up for loan defaults or pay for their employees and facilities without charging something" statement.
But none of these actually refute the suggestion that because so much of the world's money is, at any given moment, owed back with interest, we're doomed to a need for perpetual growth on a finite planet.
Tricky, eh?
The key to this, in my mind, is that it carries shades of the Left's idea that wealth, like matter, is a fixed constant that cannot be created or destroyed. In fact, wealth is constantly created and destroyed. We consume constantly, and we must produce constantly. Were the idiot correct that repayment with interest requires growth in global wealth, it would have been impossible for interest-chargers to get richer while global wealth shrunk by $trillions in recent years. If interest was an inevitable siphoning of wealth from poor to rich, no one who ever takes out a loan (business, mortgage, etc) would end up richer for it.
JD| 10.15.12 @ 6:13PM
In short, the answer to this post is "depreciation". The charging of interest, which is just for so many reasons (you must pay the lender's opportunity cost of the money he gives you), doesn't require infinite growth of global wealth because depreciation and destruction (Cash for Clunkers?) can shrink wealth faster than it grows.