Op-Ed Columnist - What We Learned From the Health Care Summit - NYTimes.comKrugman is far more "honest" (in the lefty sense) than most, giving insight into "how in the world do they think as they do"?? I'll translate.
If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection.
Translation: The left has the right to ignore all rules -- the Constitution, rules of the Senate, rules of debate and propriety. (why say "we disagree", when you can label the other side "liars") We are all "lucky" if they shove a bill that is very likely unconstitutional through the Senate, ignoring the explicit mandate of the chamber to allow the minority to apply braking to partisan railroading, even after what many would assume would be the instructive loss of their 60th seat in the chamber.
It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he’s folksy and likable and could make his party’s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.”
Wow. I guess you could say that he wasn’t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate Democrats’ plan does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But it also makes it clear that this would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The “price of a given amount of insurance coverage” would fall, not rise — and the actual cost to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.
Translation: When the left predicts the future, it is holy writ passed from Olympus, when others predict the future, it is a "lie". The left's positions are not only inherently correct, the opposition has positions that are "unreasonable".
In fact, nobody knows the future, even with a Nobel prize. There is a lot of evidence that getting the government involved raises costs (see Medicare and health care cost). Some might validly believe that a bunch of new mandates for insurance companies would raise prices. It did in Massachusetts, now the highest insurance cost state in the nation, and it was one of the main reasons that the formerly all blue state elected Scott Brown. No matter, Krugman has spoken his decree for the future, to disagree is a "lie".
So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.
But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.
Translation: The Democrats could not agree on health care with a 60-vote Senate majority, even with measures like buying the votes of some of their own party with hundreds of millions of kickbacks and voting on Christmas Eve. Now they lost that 60 vote majority due to a vote by the people in the bluest of blue states, but the RIGHT thing for them to do is to ignore that fact and shove the bill through anyway. It is however Republicans that are "arrogant". Whatever Republicans believe about the future is "a lie", what Paul and his cronies believe is the golden truth, pure in purpose and outcome.
To which one might say. Why can't we all just get along?
