Ripping Up the Social Contract

This is one of the reasons why it's important to save Medicare from the ravages of privatization: (from Krugman today)

On the other hand, it’s true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there’s a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.

That’s right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding — end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.

The bottom line is that the opponents of universal health care appear to have run out of honest arguments. All they have left are fantasies: horror fiction about health care in other countries, and fairy tales about health care here in America.

While we are crowing about stopping the forces of evil from destroying Social Security this time around, they have made considerable progress privatizing Medicare, another wildly successful social program administered by the government.   These people hate the United States of America, no doubt about it.