'You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.
I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.'
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/08/12/town_halls/print.html
I had forgotten that Camille Paglia existed, but then Edward Craig quoted her at length on the NRO Corner blog. And it is slightly shaming for me that I had shuttered my mind because she still has a wonderful scalpel of a pen. You have to elide the constant Bushitler boilerplate; she is after all a paid-up member of the intelligentsia. But her analysis of both the campaign to promote health care reform and the substance of the proposed reforms are gleaming paragons of precis.
I really will have to read Ms Paglia more often.
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