Robert Samuelson is a Heartless Monster
We need to have a candid debate about health care in 2008, but the odds are against it. The fact that covering the 47 million uninsured already looms as the centerpiece of this debate is a warning sign that it won't be serious. We're told that the uninsured are our biggest health-care problem, but they aren't. Runaway health spending is.
Yowza. It seems to me that what "our" biggest health-care problem is probably has a little something to do with who we are. Evidently the plight of the uninsured isn't a big problem for Robert Samuelson, but it's a problem for an awful lot of the uninsured people. Similarly, the risk of losing insurance is a problem for an awful lot of people. Maybe if we all got paid Samuelson's salary to churn out inane columns, everyone would share his perspective on the world. But it's really a bizarre perspective. He moans: "These proposals would inflict 'pain,' and candidates who embraced them would invite political ruin." Pain would invite ruin because people don't like policies that will make them worse off. It's a perfectly reasonable thing for voters to want to avoid.
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