Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Proud To Be A Democrat

Michael Steele, the Chairman of the RNC, does not know what an individual mandate is.

That's a topic that Democrats -- and not just wonks wonking away in the wonkosphere, but random folks at Daily Kos and both presidential candidates at the Texas debate -- were arguing about ad infinitum during the primaries. My dad, who knows little of policy and seemed to have never heard of public campaign financing when I mentioned it, was getting all heated yesterday about how there had to be a public option for health care reform. The depth of knowledge that we've cultivated about the details of health care policy, and the cultural penetration it's achieved, make me proud to live in the segment of our political culture that is the Democratic Party.

2 comments:

mccn said...

Neil - I completely agree: the more people are thinking and talking about it, the better.

One of the issues I struggle with is how to get responsible information on health care policy - something that affects my life on a daily basis - which is a giant, complex set of procedures, laws and issues.

Have you seen this blog? I'm linking here FYI - curious to know what you think. http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/07/todays-changing-medical-ethics-where.html

Neil Sinhababu said...

That's a long article and I only could get through the beginning, but I see that it was about capitation, and when I text-searched it, I got one mention of 'Britain' and none of 'UK'.

The National Health Service in the UK is one of the most prominent places that has implemented capitation and done very well by it. They've now got per capita health care costs under 50% of our own. And people love the system so much that even the Conservatives go out of their way to say how much they support it. So this "Capitation has failed everywhere it's been tried!" thing is simply false.