Sullivan on the Costs of Health-Care Reform

This is just a quickie, because I had one of those nights and I'm running late again -- or will be in a minute or two. (Pulled muscle or something in my side -- barely slept at all.)

At any rate, Andrew Sullivan makes a point in this post that I have to comment on.

I'd love a polity in which a real conservative told people that costs should be controlled first before anyone gets insurance extended to them. The idea is to make the prize conditional on the sacrifice.

This is Sullivan being theoretical again, as far as I can tell. What he doesn't acknowledge is that health care is in a crisis in this country, and in a crisis, you can't necessarily go by what you'd like to do, conservative or liberal. Nor does he acknowledge that every serious plan that's been offered actually reduces the national deficit.

It's about multi-tasking. Ever hear of "pay as you go"? The point is, we need to get coverage in place for the 47+ million people who don't have it. That's almost 12% of the people in this country, and that's an unacceptable figure.

And looking at that bit, it's pretty much unbearably smug. Oh, right -- this is Andrew Sullivan. This is someone who isn't going to be asked to make a sacrifice, and who already has his prize (one assumes -- I've never seen him write about the horrors of being uninsured).

You want to pay the bills for universal coverage? Tax the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies on excess profits -- the money they're raking in by selling services that they don't provide and getting exclusive rights to drugs that we paid to develop. (As for the drug companies, they should be paying the government royalties, the way oil companies do for drilling rights -- except they should be paying fair royalities, unlike the oil companies.)

Later -- I have to get going.