Thursday, February 21, 2013 6:48:26 PM
Swiss Myths [conservative Obamacare 'experts' gets it wrong]
February 21, 2013, 4:55 pm12 Comments
Oh, my. Aaron Carroll .. http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/i-dont-the-swiss-health-care-system-is-what-they-think-it-is/ .. is rightly very, very annoyed at Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Arik Roy .. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/02/20/the-future-of-free-market-healthcare/ .. for saying that Obamacare should be replaced with a free-market system, like Switzerland’s. As he points out, the Swiss system is nothing like their description. In particular, they denounce community rating — but Switzerland has community rating!
Actually, though, it’s even worse than Carroll lets on, for two reasons.
One is that Obamacare in fact looks a lot like, you guessed it, the Swiss system — so much so that back in 2009 I described it as a plan to Swissfy America .. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=0 . After all the screaming about the awfulness of Obamacare, it’s pretty rich to hold up as a role model a very similar system.
But wait, there’s more: the Swiss system is more privatized than other European systems — and guess what, it has higher costs, indeed second only to America’s:
Maybe Holtz-Eakin doesn’t know anything about this — but wasn’t Roy supposed to be a conservative expert in this field? Are they really unaware of the basics here? Or do they just expect their readers to be easily fooled?
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/swiss-myths/
"AZ Gov Brewer, OH Gov Kasich, and now FL Gov Scott are joining
the real world!" .. fingers being pulled from the dam .. who IS next?
February 21, 2013, 4:55 pm12 Comments
Oh, my. Aaron Carroll .. http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/i-dont-the-swiss-health-care-system-is-what-they-think-it-is/ .. is rightly very, very annoyed at Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Arik Roy .. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/02/20/the-future-of-free-market-healthcare/ .. for saying that Obamacare should be replaced with a free-market system, like Switzerland’s. As he points out, the Swiss system is nothing like their description. In particular, they denounce community rating — but Switzerland has community rating!
Actually, though, it’s even worse than Carroll lets on, for two reasons.
One is that Obamacare in fact looks a lot like, you guessed it, the Swiss system — so much so that back in 2009 I described it as a plan to Swissfy America .. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=0 . After all the screaming about the awfulness of Obamacare, it’s pretty rich to hold up as a role model a very similar system.
But wait, there’s more: the Swiss system is more privatized than other European systems — and guess what, it has higher costs, indeed second only to America’s:
Maybe Holtz-Eakin doesn’t know anything about this — but wasn’t Roy supposed to be a conservative expert in this field? Are they really unaware of the basics here? Or do they just expect their readers to be easily fooled?
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/swiss-myths/
"AZ Gov Brewer, OH Gov Kasich, and now FL Gov Scott are joining
the real world!" .. fingers being pulled from the dam .. who IS next?
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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