This week’s National Journal poll of political bloggers asked the bloggers “How serious is each of the following challenges in selling health care reform?” Bloggers of the Left and the Right agreed that “Government-run health care” was the biggest challenge, and that “Too costly” ranked second.
The challenge that I ranked as greatest, “Nothing for the insured,” came in last place on the Left, and next-to-last on the Right. My rationale:
“The real problem is that rather than getting ‘nothing,’ the already-insured will end up worse off, and more and more of them are realizing that. Tens of millions of them will get pushed out of their current private insurance, end up stuck in the public ‘option,’ and have to live with British/Canadian-style rationing by queue — in which survival rates for cancer are much lower, people wait for many months for operations, and every doctor-patient transaction is controlled by the government.”
Question 2 was “What’s the bigger political problem facing President Obama right now?” Seventy-five percent of the Right, and 33% of the Left, thought, “Concerns about his handling of the economy.” The majority of the Left voted for “The prospect Congress won’t enact health care reform this year.”
I voted for the economy, but saw it as linked to health care: “The latter is helping to cause the former. The irresponsible, reckless, pork-filled, wasteful, government-centric deficit spending spree in the so-called ‘stimulus’ has raised justifiable concerns that a health care system run by the same crowd of people will raise rather than lower costs, and will not be effectively managed.”