Health Care Reform By Easter; Moscow By Secular Christmas

Obama's recent speech was a remarkably good sign that this thing is in the bag, if only because he doesn't have the courage to stick his neck out unless it is a known outcome. This bill will not really affect most of us who get decent insurance through employers, but it should have a hugely positive effect on the slice of Americans who are being cut out by the current system either because of preexisting conditions, un(der)employment, or because their employer is too small to bargain for a decent plan.

And I hope this legislation is the first step towards something like the elusive "public option" and even single-payer. Yes, I'm saying it out loud, Michelle Bachmann is right; many supporters of this legislation do hope it will snowball into an eventual government takeover of health care. First we regulate the industry and set up "exchanges", then tomorrow we will have a public option, then with little or no fanfare you will wake up one morning to an essentially single payer system.

The way Bachmann and I see this happening is that a health plan run by the Federal government will be more popular and probably cheaper than private plans so private plans will go out of business. If you are a free-market ideologue you would know the outcome of this competition in advance: the back-asswardsness of public sector management would create a wasteful, bureaucratic, Kafkaesque nightmare of a health plan that wouldn't be nearly as attractive as the efficient, service-oriented system forged in the beneficent fires of the free-market. It seems pretty basic that you would only fear a public option if you actually thought it was going to be successful. Maybe Bachmann is a closet Marxist with her undue concern for the fate of private industry in the face of public competition. Her name does sound kind of foreign.

Obviously Medicare is popular because it is free, but it tends to get high marks for service too, and by any accounting, the government spends less money providing health insurance to senior citizens than private insurance companies charge healthy adults. A government run plan open to all citizens that charged self-sustaining premiums would presumably follow suit and most people would choose it over private plans. Only the very wealthy would choose very high-end private plans, which is certainly the American way. And insurance companies would have only their own greed and incompetence to blame for getting cut out. They should have taken a page from Hollywood's book and self-policed to keep The Man out. But Wall Street only sees the short game so here we are, very close to taking the first step towards what me and my new found comrade, Ms. Bachmann, predict will one day become something similar to single-payer health care. I love the smell of collective bargaining in the morning.