Oh, give ‘em hell, Jesse! Why on EARTH these right-wing idiots keep trusting The Market when market mechanisms keep screwing consumers over again and again is beyond all understanding.

There was a wonderful discussion of progressivism vs libertarianism over at the Marginal Revolution blog.  Tyler Cowen came up with a reasonably positive description of progressivism and challenged progressives reading to come with a reasonably positive description of libertarianism.

The problem is that none of the descriptions of libertarianism by libertarians were positive; they were all insane, in one direction or another.  It was glorious.

The best way to deal with McArdle is to note that brain-dead corporate apologetics have a low supply and a high demand, and it’s pretty clear that Ms. McArdle is responding to market forces.

I think obtuse is the word you’re looking for, Jesse. McArdle is the single most obtuse person I’ve ever encountered.

Try “when your government denies you care because it is futile and extremely costly”, you have denied a health care company the right to make a huge profit off a pace maker.

Funny, I haven’t seen QALY’s come up in the US plan at all - and there is pretty dim understanding of what they mean to the UK system, too.  What has come up, and has been extremely distorted, is the push to have final directives to prevent agonizing relatives from NOT pulling the plug when you would have wanted them too.

Which, of course, preserves profit margins all the way up the chain.

Why on EARTH these right-wing idiots keep trusting The Market when market mechanisms keep screwing consumers over again and again is beyond all understanding.

It’s as though they want less control over their lives. If they turn everything over to the market, then it doesn’t really matter who they vote for. Mind you, the vote is a really weak control mechanism, but it’s something, which is way more than you get when you’re facing down a corporation.

<blockquote>The debate over the “rationing” of healthcare has come down to two sides: conservatives who reflexively hate government <strike>and so live in fear of some government bureaucrat rationing off healthcare</strike> except not even a little since they support without exception warrantless wiretapping, gitmo, tazer culture, the obscene number of people we have in prison, and government support for and propping up of wealthy elites, plus the imposition of Christianity on everyone else, and those of us who realize that healthcare is already effectively rationed off by insurance companies. <blockquote>

There, fixed it for you.

True markets (in the classic sense) only work when demand is wholly elastic.  When it is, the “X” Supply and Demand curve works nearly perfectly.  However, when demand is inelastic, which it is for necessities, the suppliers have a coercive power that is essentially unlimited.

It is for this reason that most utilities in this country work through some variation of a ‘public service commission.’  It is this commission’s job to see that there are guarteed profits and that those profits are high enough to encourage investment but no so high as to be ‘gouging.’

Without some control mechanism, medical costs will continue to grow in the double digit inflation range while everything else is in the single digit range.  It will continue to grow until they have squeezed the last dime they can out of us or until the system implodes.  This is classic capitalist economics.  It is not evil per se, it’s just the way it works.  Markets find their maximum profitability level.  Profits are far higher than they would be if the demand were elastic; e.g., I NEED the pill v. I WANT the iPod.

The question is are we willing, as service consumers, to allow this?  The Rethugs believe in markets above all things.  Their real God isn’t God at all, it is “the invisible hand.”  Not that any of them have ever read economics (or much of anything), but they BELIEVE.

In the mean time, increasing medicals costs are crowding out demand for other goods; e.g., iPods, education, cars, etc.

I think most of this is coming from taking “Government healthcare will be just as bad as if not worse than private health insurance” as axiomatic, reverse engineering a basis for this axiom—insurers have profit motive driving denial of coverage, the government won’t have that but will still do it because…uh…they’re evil!  They’re pandimensional space-Nazis!  They get sexual gratification from the melding of eugenics and actuary tables!  This is exactly what I would do if I could, so they’ll do it too!—and then interpreting every new or previously unexamined aspect of single-payer care through the lens of that basis.  Not only is the cognitive dissonance deafening, but it’s damn near impenetrable to anyone not in the same parallel universe that spawned the pretzel-logic.

This is pretty great because it sums up the entire right-wing argument, IE that people being killed by corporations for profit is totally great.

It was one week ago today that Megan McArdle admitted (http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/08/its_all_in_the_budget.php#comments) that she didn’t have the first fucking clue what health insurance in America actually costs.

Somehow, this did not give her the idea of maybe hitting some books and Web sites and learning something about the health-insurance system before giving her opinion on it again.

She’s very special, isn’t she? It’s almost evangelical, the way she doesn’t let her wrongness get in the way of her essential rightness.

It’s not so much that McArdle is wrong.  It’s that she proves herself wrong and then stands on her mountain of stupid wrongness sneering at everyone who’s noticed that she’s gloriously fucking wrong about everything.

I adore you, sir.  That’s all.

To be fair, learning about a “system” that is far from systematic (except where profit is concerned) is very difficult.  The arbitrary and byzantine twists and turns of stupid are mind numbing.  There is no knowing or understanding such a system.

So much easier to say “I got mine so nothing is broken here for me so don’t change it ‘kay?”.

I just love the projection; McArdle is just more clueless about it..

Gov’t medicine will deny you pacemakers!!!!

That already happens.

Death panels.

Already happen.

Rationing.

Already happens.

Long waiting periods.

Already happen.

Can’t see your doctor/your doctor limited in prescribing/operating

Already happens.

The difference is, under gov’t run healthcare, profit isn’t the motivator People are not made richer by denying care.  I’m assuming gov’t regulations would require a basic level of care, something that private insurance companies don’t offer.  You have to get insurance through your employment, and your state is probably already limiting them to one or two companies. 

We have virtual monopolies of medical payment systems that suck $Billions (with a B) out of the system for no good reason—since it leaves us with lower life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates, and risk of bankruptcy in addition to providing rationing, waiting periods, and death panels.

They need to go.  Health care is not market driven, and allowing insurance middlemen into the equation is a big part of why health care costs rise so much.  It’s why tort reform isn’t really needed, since a big part of lawsuits are attempts to get funding for health care.

Get the middlemen out of there.  Doctors and hospitals can cut staff since they wont need a legion of people dedicated to jumping through hoops to get their earned payments.  People won’t fear going to the doctor b/c it’s expensive or they’re afraid of discovering a “pre-existing condition”.

The nightmare the Anti-Obamacarers rant about is already here.  They are either too rich and healthy to have been affected by it, or they are just crazy idiots who get all their info from Fox and don’t understand they are being used.

If you have a strong gag reflex, there’s quite a bit of additional background in Mark Ames’ examination of how Megan McArgle woke up one day to find herself as The Atlantic’s Glibertarian Poster Girl.

Portrait Of A Libertarian As A Taxpayer-Subsidized Brat

Meanwhile, a fairly thoughtful, libertarian leaning friend writes:

Why is wealth redistribution by way of a for-profit health insurance company that you don’t control better than wealth redistribution by a government that you are lead to believe you do?

There’s no way to have healthcare without it being rationed in some way, because it’s a finite good that dispensed by people who know a hell of a lot more about what works and what doesn’t than most of the people seeking it.

But that’s just it.  We’ve got a general surplus of food in this country.  Yet food is a finite good dispensed by professional agriculture companies.  We’ve got a general surplus of cars in this country.  Yet cars are a finite good dispensed by engineers and dealerships.  We’ve got no shortage of lawyers and tax accountants, of plumbers and wine and computers and IT guys.

The problem with health care isn’t supply / demand.  It’s price.  If demand for health care goes up, we are more than happy to train more doctors and nurses, build more hospitals, and do more research on more advanced treatments.  But just like you’re never going to be able to buy a car for $100, you’re never going to get hip surgery on a minimum wage budget.

When you’ve got 47 million uninsured who can’t pay the bills, you never get your demand because you lack people that can actually pay.  If we insure everyone in America, I guarantee that the supply will grow.  More hospitals will go up.  More people will apply to med schools.  More med schools will open.

Medication has a bit of a different issue revolving around patients and generic imports.  But this is not a supply / demand problem, it’s a monopoly problem.  The drug companies can produce all the drugs we could possibly want to ingest.  But they want to charge $20 / pill and that’s expensive.  So high prices suppress demand.  Supply isn’t an issue.

In the first case, rationing is temporary.  In the second, it’s completely unnecessary.

These arguments are complete FBS it makes my head spin.  As someone who watched both grannies die, saw one get lots of unnecessary treatment, and the other almost get another round of radiation, there is a point where palliative care is MUCH more humane than care aimed at postponing death.  My mom was so affected by seeing her mother in pain and with such a reduced quality of life that it compelled her to make her wishes for her end stage care very clear.  My mother-in-law has a simliar experience with her sister and it prompted her to write a living will.

The issue is when the pacemaker will not improve granny’s life, or even when putting it in will kill her. 

The issue is also asking granny what she wants!  Consulting on advance directives is not the same as working up a DNR and having them sign it.

That is, in fact, why progressives are so fond of rules.

So McArdle believes health care should be rationed on an arbitrary, capricious basis depending on how much the decision-maker likes you?

My favorite from the comments: In response to the inevitable “pricing people out of a market is not rationing and therefore acceptable” argument, someone asks, “What happens if you can’t afford the treatment? Say, a woman, for breast cancer?” The response:

It’s called a “fundraiser.” My friend’s sister-in-law recently died of a brain tumor at a tragically young age. They raised over $3000 for her care at one bake sale alone. I proudly contributed to this bake sale, as did many others and all of the people who bought the baked goods. People even just donated money without taking baked goods at all. My daughter and her friend held a separate bake sale of their own and raised over $100 all by themselves. If 11 year old girls know how it works, why don’t you?

This, obviously, is an optimally efficient way to run a health care system.

“This, obviously, is an optimally efficient way to run a health care system.”

What, you don’t approve of death panels composed of the entire community casting their votes via brownies and rice crispie treats?

LIBERTARIAN REALITY ALERT!  Granny is already covered by Medicare, which, last I looked was a government administered program. So it should be simple enough when doing all this effing theorizing about risky government rationing of health care to, you know, actually point to some in the real world. (Not to mention that even her example is kerflumpt:  Medicare already covers cardiac pacemakers and implantable defibrillators.) Or even to point to such life-threatening government rationing in those other industrial countries who have national health insurance of some sort (as in all).

They really don’t do reality, though, do they.

Wow. They raised $3,100. That paid for what, one day of treatments?

And, at the risk of sounding callous, this may not be the best example, given that the friend’s sister-in-law, um, died anyway.

It works so well that the young lady… died of a brain tumor at a tragically young age.

Hmmmmmmmmm.

Hmmmmmmmmm.

But there is also a real difference between having something rationed by a process and having it rationed by a person.

I realize that McMegan is completely, 100% clueless about how the health insurance industry works, but she is at least aware that insurance company employees are given cash bonuses for denying care to policyholders, right?  Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t really see that someone denying me care because it puts cash in their pocket is morally better than someone denying me care because of a matrix.

A fundraiser??? Really? There are so many problems with that, I don’t know where to start. Does she know that medical bills can run into the 6 digits pretty easily? It’s a pretty small segment of society that can ‘fundraise’ that much money for one person’s medical bills.
And who exactly is the person spending the time and energy to sell thousands of dollars worth of brownies?

I think her problem is that she really doesn’t understand that there are people who are not extremely wealthy.

I really liked that part as well. Does she realize as she argues that rationing by process is okay that she has said in the past that corporate taxes are stupid since all taxes are paid by people?

My favorite comment:

To impose rationing, Ayn Rand explained in a letter to a friend, means “to distribute [goods and services] in a certain particular manner–by the decision of an absolute authority, with the recipients having no choice about what they receive.” Rationing means that the government decides how much of some good or service you are allotted.

This bears no relation to what happens under the price system of a free market. On a free market, goods and services are not rationed. They are produced by individuals and then voluntarily exchanged for the goods and services others have produced. A craftsman builds a chair, which he sells for money, which he uses to purchase a doctor’s services. A doctor trades his services for money, which he then exchanges for a lawnmower.

The difference between prices and rationing is the difference between you choosing what groceries to buy and the government telling you what food you’re allowed to eat.

Beside the Randianism, I appreciate the idea that free-market health insurance simply does not ration.  And that all actions are totally voluntary within that market.  Other than being complete bullshit, it’s a great argument!

So McArdle believes health care should be rationed on an arbitrary, capricious basis depending on how much the decision-maker likes you?

More precisely, as a Rotarian socialist McArdle believes health care should be rationed on an arbitrary, capricious basis depending on how much money you make and how much power you have in relation to large corporations—in other words, the current system.

Having read the ExiledOnline article about McArdle’s background yesterday (and the follow-ups, which are funny, too), colour me shocked ... shocked! ... to find that the entitled daughter of a man who fronted a Mobbed-up trade association, and whose education and career start were made possible by his salary and nepotistic connections, would think this way.

Does she realize as she argues that rationing by process is okay that she has said in the past that corporate taxes are stupid since all taxes are paid by people?

That last statement is even odder considering that McArdle and her ilk are slavishly committed to the concept of corporate personhood when it works to a BigCorp’s legal advantage: give corporations all the rights of taxpaying citizens, but, um, let them off the hook for the taxpaying part.

I guess it’s a rule now that every publication with a reputation (bogus or not) for being liberal now has to have at least one ignorant and logic-challenged conservative columnist featured prominently on its masthead.

I think her problem is that she really doesn’t understand that there are people who are not extremely wealthy.

At the risk of sounding like I’m nagging people to read and click the link on my previous comment: Last week Megan McArdle thought you could get “generous” health insurance in New York State for $350 a month.

And she’s still writing about health insurance, and she still thinks people should listen to what she says.

This bears no relation to what happens under the price system of a free market. On a free market, goods and services are not rationed. They are produced by individuals and then voluntarily exchanged for the goods and services others have produced. A craftsman builds a chair, which he sells for money, which he uses to purchase a doctor’s services. A doctor trades his services for money, which he then exchanges for a lawnmower.

You can always tell when they’re pulling self-justifying theories out of their asses. There are never any facts, names, numbers; it’s all hypothetical. That’s your signal to stop reading.

“It’s much nicer if you create a mathematical formula that makes some doctor tell grandma to take morphine instead of getting a pacemaker.  Then the doctor can disclaim responsibility too, because after all, no one really has any agency here—we’re all just in the grips of an impersonal force.”

There are already mathematical formulas at work right now.  They’re called actuarial tables.

As we’ve already established, Granny will get her pacemaker through Medicare.  It’s the rest of us who are screwed.

“Using the government’s coercive power to decide the price of something, or who ought to get it, is qualitatively different from the same outcome arising out of voluntary actions in the marketplace.”

I bet when Granny is dead, she’ll have plenty of time to ponder that interesting philosophical question of the differences between individual guilt for the bad consequences of individual decisions versus the collective guilt of organizations, businesses, or a whole country for the bad consequences of collective decisions.  And the differences between the “coercive” power of The Government versus the “voluntary” actions of The Marketplace.

‘Course, she’ll still be dead no matter what.

But I guess this attitude helps explain why when you get caught robbing somebody’s purse you go to jail; but if you rob billions from private investor’s accounts, people paying premiums, and American taxpayers, and the only service you render to society is making yourself even richer, you not only don’t get caught, you get paid millions to keep doing it,  ‘cause that’s just Capitalism, Baby!...

You can always tell when they’re pulling self-justifying theories out of their asses. There are never any facts, names, numbers; it’s all hypothetical. That’s your signal to stop reading.

My signal to stop reading that graf was her invocation of the perfect, friction-less free market that would exist absent that horrible government interference (of the sort her dad practised for decades in NYC before he went to work shilling for the city’s construction industry).

It’s as if she’s never heard of things like monopolies, price-gouging, greed-driven artificial scarcities, collusion, unwilling captive audiences, etc, etc. Just what you’d expect from The Atlantic‘s economics expert, right?

This bears no relation to what happens under the price system of a free market. On a free market, goods and services are not rationed.

Which bears no relation to the pain that my coworker is in while he waits for his insurer to approve a hip surgery for which he is “too young” but needs to maintain his mobility.  Then he can get on a multi-month waiting list for the one surgeon who has experience with it.

Or he could just go back to the UK where it would get done fairly quickly, as he is a citizen.

...there is a point where palliative care is MUCH more humane than care aimed at postponing death.

Back when I worked at a medical clinic, my boss had a few patients who were very seriously ill, but were also terrified of death.  It pained me to see them/hear about them enduring painful treatments or generally just fretting about their health when they could have spent their last days with their families or just resting peacefully.

I’m sorry, but seriously, fuck anyone who thinks you can treat a brain tumor for $3100. Or that a cancer patient and her family and friends have the time and energy to bake a million fucking cookies to try to earn it.

Anyone who can reduce the healthcare problem to a “brownies for brains” solution has a level of ignorance that can only be attributed to sheer callous disregard for human life. You have to be way more than lazy to keep up a delusion that monumental.

It’s called a “fundraiser.” My friend’s sister-in-law recently died of a brain tumor at a tragically young age. They raised over $3000 for her care at one bake sale alone. I proudly contributed to this bake sale, as did many others and all of the people who bought the baked goods. People even just donated money without taking baked goods at all. My daughter and her friend held a separate bake sale of their own and raised over $100 all by themselves. If 11 year old girls know how it works, why don’t you?

Yes, because as we all know, the most effective way to deal with a medical issue for an uninsured person that will likely cost well over $100,000 is to sell cookies and muffins.

They would have had just as much success addressing their friend’s medical expenses by walking up and down every street in America picking up pennies in the street.

What fucking planet do these idiots live on?

Anyone who can reduce the healthcare problem to a “brownies for brains” solution has a level of ignorance that can only be attributed to sheer callous disregard for human life. You have to be way more than lazy to keep up a delusion that monumental.

No no.  I think they’re on to something here.  We just need to scale up the program.  Put a tax on all baked goods and use the revenue to pay for universal health care.  We’ll call it the Universal Bake Sale Brain Tumor Treatment Act.  That’s where the discussion is going, right?

The issue is also asking granny what she wants!  Consulting on advance directives is not the same as working up a DNR and having them sign it.

Speaking of <strike>advance directives</strike> evil granny-killing death panels, I find it curious that neither Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, nor Pat Buchanan has been willing to direct their criticism of the <strike>advance directives</strike> evil granny-killing death panels provision in the bill towards the legislator who is responsible for the clause…

<u>Republican</u> Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia.

Socially-conservative, “pro-life” REPUBLICAN Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia is the man responsible for the provision which addresses <strike>advance directives</strike> evil granny-killing death panels in the proposed legislation.

For whatever it’s worth, Sen. Isakson has responded that he thinks the claims by Palin that his advance directives clause amounts to a “death panel” is “nuts”.

Back when I worked at a medical clinic, my boss had a few patients who were very seriously ill, but were also terrified of death.  It pained me to see them/hear about them enduring painful treatments or generally just fretting about their health when they could have spent their last days with their families or just resting peacefully.

That isn’t even the real problem.  The problem comes when people may not want further treatment, but are treated at great futile expense in their last days because they didn’t have an advance directive and their distraught family members got talked into stuff.  That’s where the huge expense comes in, and how a living will program would save money AND honor individual beliefs and wishes.  Most people DO NOT want to die like that, but many end up that way be default and at tremendous expense.

Now you know where the scare tacticts are coming from - the profiteers of misery.

But there is also a real difference between having something rationed by a process and having it rationed by a person. - McArdle

And the market is not a process or system that does rationing?

I could make similar comments about why even so-called Christian conservatives lurve them some markets: they hate the thought of individual humans (tainted by Sin since the Fall of Man) making decisions as those decisions are bound to lead to perdition and they hate the thought of using rules to make decisions even more (c.f. Paul’s comments about how Law leads to Sin).  But “the market” is something impersonal and not based on laws handed down by humans nor even by God but rather reflects the guiding spirit of the Holy Ghost, as renamed “the invisible hand” (I guess I could comment on the Scottish Calvinist roots of Thermodynamics here—see religion does influence science!—but that would be drifting too off topic) —and thus the results of the market, unlike the results of systems based on the discretion of individuals or of rules, are always good and just.

Ms. McArdle may declare herself a secular libertarian, but her point of view is just a dressed up version of a peculiar (and many would say heretical) version of Christianity, which has an inherent distrust of both Rule of Man and Rule of Law, which leaves Rule of Chance to be the only alternative.

I suspect, though, the Prophets, who denounced divination, etc. (I should revisit my comments on the Prophetic/Torah denunciations of sacred pillars) and certainly Jesus would disagree with Ms. McArdle’s position.

Most people DO NOT want to die like that, but many end up that way be default and at tremendous expense. - Ms. Kate

Unfortunately, many people cringe so much at even thinking about their dying that they can’t even bring themselves to commit such things to paper.

keshmeshi - the look on my grandmother’s face in the days before her death was one of fear, and there is no way to eliminate that.  I don’t know what impact it had, but a week before she passed the family was still discussing the next round of radiation and not in spiritual preparation.  Conservatives should be quick to agree with the idea that there comes a time when you need a priest more than you need your doctor.  It seems like they want to debate the fact that we’re all going to die.  I don’t want money wasted on me in the last weeks of life, the way it often is, and I would rather be comfortable with my family than painfully enduring more treatment.

One thing to keep in mind is that what’s being rationed isn’t *care*, it’s *dollars*.

Right now, you can get as much health care as you can pay for; what you might not get is the opportunity to pool your risks with others, and have high costs paid for if they arise.

If reform passes, you’ll have more opportunity (you might even have a mandate) to pool risks, and you’ll still be able to get all the health care you can afford, but certain costs will be covered by insurance, and some won’t.

But there is also a real difference between having something rationed by a process and having it rationed by a person. - McArdle

And the market is not a process or system that does rationing?

When you read that McArdle quote by itself, you get absolutely no sense which one is better than which. Or which one SHE thinks is better than which. Or any correlation to real-world events whatsoever. Which, once again, is your hint that she is just throwing a bunch of words on a page and thinking someone’s impressed by all the syllables and “theory.”

Ms. McArdle may declare herself a secular libertarian, but her point of view is just a dressed up version of a peculiar (and many would say heretical) version of Christianity,

Yep. She’d likely declare herself a secular libertarian intellectual, which brings to mind the famous discussion question about the Holy Roman Empire.

She appears to have forgotten that an insurance company is made up of people. And that a market is made up of people. Or perhaps she just thinks that when you’re trading in a market, you’re not morally responsible for your actions.

asdf,

The analogy would be between that of gas molecules and a gas itself: gas molecules move about at random, but the collective motion of a gas is from high pressure to low pressure, for example.

Similarly, a market is indeed made up of individuals (tainted by sin) buying and selling stuff: but collectively a market’s behavior is dictated not by a mere averaging of the behavior of (sinful) individuals but is guided by the invisible hand (of the Holy Ghost).

“Or perhaps she just thinks that when you’re trading in a market, you’re not morally responsible for your actions.”

MoneyCons seem to believe that Business and Ethics are two completely different and unrelated areas, and have believed so for a long time.

So yeah, she basically admits that as long as a business killed Granny by denying care, and not Government, it’s okay…

She appears to have forgotten that an insurance company is made up of people. And that a market is made up of people. Or perhaps she just thinks that when you’re trading in a market, you’re not morally responsible for your actions.

It’s more along the lines of her thinking that an insurance company is a sort of uber-person (so much so that it should be exempt from paying taxes), and that people like its customers and employees only exist to be insignificant cells in its highly rational inner workings—such status enforced by the government, which exists only to protect the all-benificent corporate individual against the depredations of rogue (AKA “irrational”) cells and trauma from external threats.

Similarly, the market is amoral and supremely rational, because (contrary to those silly behavioural economists) all participants are rational actors, who simply function as cells to support the market and, by extension, all the wonderful uber-persons it’s meant to serve. Morality is useful only insofar as it keeps most of the cells in their place vis-a-vis the uber-persons and the more important cell clusters known as the “major shareholder class.”

Welcome to the world of extreme free market Libertarians.

Or perhaps she just thinks that when you’re trading in a market, you’re not morally responsible for your actions.

DING DING DING!!!

‘Free markets are inherently moral’ or some similar mindless platitude is the perennial shield glibertarians hide behind when they need to excuse some particularly egregious example of destructive avarice.  After all, if markets are inherently moral, then everyone involved in them must be too, right?  Right.

Someone explain to me again, just how is it she gets these plumb writing positions?

Whoops! I meant “plum”. Although if she were a plumber the universe would make more sense.

<blockquote>Whoops! I meant “plum”. Although if she were a plumber the universe would make more sense. <blockquote>

If she were a plumber, she’d be an unlicensed one, dreaming of being an imaginary mill-yo-naire and whingeing about Obama stealing her pretend money.

As to your question, check out melior’s link above, keeping in mind that exiledonline is a pretty rough and un-PC site.

There’s a reason the phrase Wingnut Welfare was invented.

I just read melior’s link.  Wow! I have to admit it makes more sense than my theory, which is that she’s sucked a lot of dick to get where she is.

Christ, pablo. Incompetent men get prominent jobs at overrated media outlets all the time, simply for parroting the ruling class’s propaganda. The non-sexist assumption would be that an incompetent woman has done the same.

I would’ve said the exact same thing about a man.

It amuses me to no end when men call ‘sucking dick’ a horrible, degrading activity. You know how many of them really refuse to allow anyone to give them a blowjob.

I think the problem may be less stupidity and more callousness (for Republicans in general - Ms. McArdle is clearly a few sandwiches short of a picnic). It makes sense that you should have access to only as fancy a car as you can pay for. Or furniture. Or clothing. Government-distributed dining sets that make it harder for you personally to acquire the dining set you want might make some people legitimately upset.

But this is about peoples *lives*. The market breaks down because demand is inelastic (as has been pointed out). But more importantly, this is a case where it is just plain wrong to make it about the market. Because not being able to afford designer furniture, and not being able to afford life-saving care are (or should be) viewed differently by society. The former, meh, make do with craigslist. A similar ‘sucks to be you’ attitude about healthcare is callousness bordering on being evil.

There are some things that should be distributed equitably, like the right to free speech. Necessary healthcare is one of those things, and has no more business being allocated by the free market than your right to vote does. (Huh. As I was writing this I was trying to think of a right that the wingnuts also respect. Maybe owning guns? But I’m sure some of them would be pro poll tax…)

My daughter and her friend held a separate bake sale of their own and raised over $100 all by themselves.

$100 buys, what, a pair of rubber gloves?

I think that ostensible “person/system” dichotomy does a great job of encapsulating McArdle’s privilege and her blindness to it.

If you’re white and rich, the system we have now is incredibly well-set-up to protect your interests (or what you shortsightedly think are your interests). And it’s easy to imagine that some system set up by liberals or black people or—can it even be spoken?!—black liberals might not be set up the same way.

But the privilege of the white and rich is also very much based on personal interaction. People defer to them. People decide to cut them a break. People have lunch with their parents at the country club.  People wouldn’t dare cross them for fear of getting in trouble. They know people, or know someone who does.

So when McArdle thinks of a system set up by people in government, she automatically thinks of something inimical to her interests, a setup where her status and connections don’t count. When she thinks of a person deciding whether to cover her operation, she can’t really imagine someone (unless it’s one of those envious little functionaries) denying her what she deserves.

I think she’s not so much malicious as wilfully blind. And as a result can’t imagine herself in the position of tens of millions of people who pretty much have it ingrained that a person with the power to make arbitrary decisions about their lives will screw them 3 times out of 4. Otherwise she couldn’t write something like that and expect her readers to just “get” it.

Please remember, Pablo is uncloseted. I don’t think he has a bad attitude towards cock-sucking.

“She’s sucked a lot of dick to get where she is” sure does display the view that cocksucking is a degrading activity for a woman.

The government (read Medicare) just bought my elderly uncle a pacemaker last week. Is this part of a liberal government plot to deny people health care and kill the elderly?

My daughter and her friend held a separate bake sale of their own and raised over $100 all by themselves.

“That’s great, honey!  Now go do just that 10,000 more times.”  I mean, there’s only so many cupcakes one community can buy.  Do you want to live in a world where every trip to the grocery store becomes a gauntlet of sad-eyed children hawking the baked goods that are the only thing standing be them and being orphans?  I have a hard enough time saying no to Girl Scouts as it is.

But Orange, that same government has doctors denying care to my 97 year old grandmother-in-law because she won’t survive it and it won’t buy her much time given her other issues.

Never mind that she fully agrees with these decisions ... THEY ARE KILLING GRANDMA!

Funny thing about extremely aged people - they don’t seen too keen on heroic end of life measures.  Maybe they have seen too many of their friends linger as their desperate familes scramble.  Maybe it’s an opinionated personality trait of people who live to their 90s and 100s, but must are pretty frank about “just pull the plug, ok?”.

Okay mythago, how about “provided personal services not available on the open market”.

Ms Kate:

Also, many of them have done the things they wanted to do, and know that their scope for further interesting experiences is limited. So they may not be in a hurry to shuffle off, but neither is there a lot of unfinished business calling them to stay. (And on a micro level the statistics bear this out, with deaths increasing slightly just after birthdays, anniversaries and holidays…)

and medicare would happily pay for a emergency surgery to install a pacemaker in an otherwise healthy 97-year-old . . .

Sorry to be callous but I can’t resist throwing this in:  perhaps the death panels will work not by denying necessary care but by giving unnecessary care with a high rate of potentially fatal complications?

Kate @68 wins the thread! LOL!

Pacemaker is really a low-risk surgery anymore, and a quality of life issue for an elder.  Probably not the best example (I think GMIL had hers replaced a couple years back, actually).

But it makes no sense to put a woman her age through chemo for a low grade breast cancer lump.

Please remember, Pablo is uncloseted. I don’t think he has a bad attitude towards cock-sucking.

Bingo! I only disapprove when you’re doing it to advance your career.  In retrospect I can see where my remark could be interpreted as sexist.  I just assumed her bosses were male, so I probably should’ve said she “performed a lot of oral sex”, but it just doesn’t have the same bite to it.