Posted by
Disgruntled in NY on Friday, July 31, 2009 1:04:09 PM
First, at -03.23 of the clip, there was the following exchange about the healthcare proposal:
George Stephanopoulos: "What would you consider a bottom line victory?" (at -03.23):
Paul Krugman: "In a way, since I have my own goals on healthcare, I can’t say what my final, what’s the least I’ll accept, because that then becomes a negotiating point.”
The amazing thing about Krugman's statement is the extent to which he expressly sees himself as a policy maker with a role negotiating the final shape of any new healthcare bill. He is afraid to say what he wants because that would be used to negotiate against him. It seems to me that, as a Nobel Prize winner, as journalist for the NY and as a pundit generally, he could be more useful in the process by using his extenive analytical skills to explain to me and the rest of the hoi polloi exactly what we should want to get out of any healthcare bill. However, instead of seeing that it is his role to explain what is going on, he obviously believes he was put on this earth to influence the shape of the healthcare bill. He has completely thrown out the window any pretense that he is an objective commentator on the debate.
Second, at -03.23 of the clip, Krugman said the following: "There is a theory, which I subscribe to, that if you get universality, cost control will follow through the political mechanism. Massachussets has a universal healthcare system that has zero cost control. It was a disaster from the cost control point of view. Now Massachusetts is getting serious about cost control because once you’ve established that you no longer have the safety valve of dealing with rising costs by making more people uninsured, then you have to deal with the problem."
Here, Krugman seems to be saying that the Democratic goal is to adopt a wildly expensive plan that cannot be paid for and that, once everybody is covered by it, there will pressure to rein in the cost (i.e., rationing) in order to ensure the continued viability of the healthcare system. In fairness to his point, he believes (I think without much rigorous academic research to support him) that, right now, increased costs lead to a decrease in the number of people who are insured. His other message here is that Democrats want to adopt an overly expensive plan now in order to get rationing later. This is very much like the Reagan-eraargument (ironically derided by Krugman and his ilk) that tax cuts would increase the deficit and the ballooning deficit would put pressure on government spending and reduce the size of government.