Check out the headline on this AP story:
Can you image the AP describing non-leftists’ ideas on health care as “reform”? Can you imagine them describing leftists’ objections to non-leftists’ ideas as “attacks” on those “reforms”?
Revealingly, the “attack” is just an industry study of the cost associated with the supposed leftist plan du jour. The horribly unfair and unjust industry conclusion of the evil insurance companies?
The chief reason, said the report, is a decision by lawmakers to weaken proposed penalties for failing to get health insurance. The bill would require insurers to take all applicants, doing away with denials for pre-existing health problems. In return, all Americans would be required to carry coverage, either through an employer or a government program, or by buying it themselves.
But the CBO estimated that even with new federal subsidies, some 17 million Americans would still be unable to afford health insurance. Faced with that affordability problem, senators opted to ease the fines for going without coverage from the levels Baucus originally proposed. The industry says that will only let people postpone getting coverage until they get sick.
It is one of the strange conceits of leftists that they believe that people do not respond to economic incentives. It’s simply common sense that if insurance remains very expensive for people, but they know that by law all insurance companies will have to grant coverage at any time, even if they’re already in the hospital, the economically rational thing for people to do is to delay purchasing health insurance until the very moment they need it. Pointing out that people respond to economic incentives and that they make decisions that provide them the best economic outcome is considered an “attack” by the AP
The AP is so far in the tank they can’t even see out of it.
[update (2009-20-12 3:58pm): I must not have been the only one to notice. Now the headline reads, “Insurance industry assails health care bill.” Maybe they can learn.]
This is a sign that the insurance effort is dead. It is what I call “The Defection of the Stakeholders.”
Once the insurance industry decided the stake that it is holding would get smaller and not larger, they decided to walk away from the game.
Whitehall,
Yes, as long as it looked like the government was going to (1) force everyone to buy insurance (2) was going to subsidize the uninsurable (3) was going to control cost at the medical provider end, insurance companies stood to profit handsomely. Now, that the subsidy looks to small, they’re bailing.
The useful idiots in the media will report the Dalai Bama’s failure to create a government meat grinder “healthcare” system as the communists reported all socialist failures – as successes. When that’s just too absurd to fly, they will report failures as deliberate attacks by the bourgeois, capitalists and other Enemies of the People. The good news is that even the useful idiots realize the meat grinder is a failure. All of this is uncomfortably familiar to me.
re update:
If you’ve ever seen traffic analysis of news articles marked as hits over time, the vast majority of them look something like a left shifted bell curve. Put the bias in the early version, get most of your hits with that and change it to something neutral before you can have it ticked off as an example of bias by your slow moving watchdogs. Yes, the AP has learned something but I’m not quite sure what that something is.
I have often wondered why the right let’s the left pick the terms of so many debates. “Health care reform” suggests that health care will be improved. The Obama / socialist “health care reform” has virtually nothing in it that will improve health care. It is more about increasing socialist medical care which appears almost universally to result in worse medical care for the masses (or middle and lower class if you prefer) while the oligarchs will continue to have the best medical care paid for by the pee ons.
So, why don’t we just call the Obama / socialist health care proposal what it is? Health care takeover??, socialist health care?? but not “reform”.