Follow-Up on Health Care

This is what ivory-tower libertarians are advocating in terms of health care. Digby quotes from this CNN story:

An estimated 2 million babies die within their first 24 hours each year worldwide and the United States has the second worst newborn mortality rate in the developed world, according to a new report. . . .

"The United States has more neonatologists and neonatal intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, but its newborn rate is higher than any of those countries," said the annual State of the World's Mothers report.

The article focuses on infant mortality in developing countries, but it's worth noting that only Latvia among "developed" nations has a higher infant mortality rate than the U.S. The causes are not hard to figure out -- access to adequate health care, which is why the rates are infant mortality here are higher for the poor and under-educated.

And yet, universal health care in the U.S. is what people like Megan McArdle find "immoral" because, in her reasoning, it forces the "young and healthy" to care for the "old and sick." Given the complete balderdash that McArdle advances as an argument, I think that Digby's analysis is essentially correct:

I don't know why these Republicans aren't embarrassed that their great country ranks lower than every developed country in the world except Latvia, but they aren't. But then, they just lie, don't they? Here's your possible next president Rudy:

America has the best medical care in the world. People come here from around the world to take advantage of our path-breaking medicine and state-of-the-art treatments.

Well, rich people do anyway, and those are the only people who count.

I guess this argument works on Republicans who don't give a damn about anyone but themselves (most of them) and are employed. Let's hope they don't lose their jobs.

And, lest we forget who shares this sort of view, remember that it was James Dobson, among others, who protested to the National Association of Evangelicals about a call to focus on helping the poor and protecting the environment, demanding that its author be silenced or forced to resign.

I think one's arguments are known by the company they keep, like it or not.

Update:

Just to make the point very, very clear, this post by TeddySanFran at FDL is a nice capsule view of compassionate conservatism, California style:

What did Arnold veto after the budget passed with the votes of these holdout GOPs? Fifty-one line items in the budget encompassing $703,000,000 in spending — $527,000,000 of it from health and human services.

Powerful appeal? Is it powerfully appealing to cut $310,000,000 from Medi-Cal reserves, an entitlement that’ll simply get a later supplemental appropriation to cover costs? Is it powerfully appealing to cut $55,000,000 from a program that provides mental health services for the homeless? According to State Senator Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) who wrote the bill that created this program in 2000:

"The program provides over 4,500 homeless Californians living with mental illness with permanent housing, where they can regularly receive medical and psychiatric treatment and job counseling. The program has been wildly successful according to the Department of Mental Health, reducing the number of days spent homeless by 67 percent, increasing the number of days working full-time by 65 percent, and reducing the number of days incarcerated by 72 percent.

"This is a program that works, that saves the state money in incarceration costs and that humanely treats a population that usually gets short shrift in Sacramento,” Steinberg said. “I’m extremely disappointed that the Governor used his veto power in a way that punishes the least among us.”

Read the post to see what got left in the budget. Unfortunately, no surprises.