[Vision2020] The Wonk Gap

[Donovan Arnold]

Sticker shock? Like allowing $12000 a month for a shared bedroom in a long term care facility isn't already sticker shock? Allowing $2700 for a pill someone needs to live and only costs a few dollars to make isn't sticker shock? $2000 for a short ride in an ambulance, or $30,000 for a ride in a helicopter, isn't sticker shock? 
 
It is long past due for the People to have the Right to assemble and create a national healthcare plan, and voluntarily pay into it in exchange for needed medical care. Why is this illegal in our country? 
 
 The reason this nation established a Federal Government in the first place was to promote the general Welfare of the People. Not to put people on Medicaid and Welfare simply because they cannot afford medical bills. If we had a national healthcare system, based on income, millions could go back to work and taken off of welfare programs. Many people only claim disability because their work would not cover the medical costs. So they live on $850 a month at taxpayer expense, rather then working a part time job making more. This is another failure of our nation, forcing people into poverty and onto welfare. 
 
50% of the problems in this nation would vanish if we had a voluntary income based national healthcare system like the rest of modern 21st century nations.
 
Donovan J. Arnold 
 
 
 

________________________________
 From: Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com>
To: vision2020 at moscow.com 
Sent: Monday, September 9, 2013 6:32 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] The Wonk Gap
  


    

________________________________
 
September 8, 2013 
The Wonk Gap 
By PAUL KRUGMAN 
On Saturday, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming delivered the weekly Republican address. He ignored Syria, presumably because his party is deeply conflicted on 
the issue. (For the record, so am I.) Instead, he demanded repeal of the Affordable Care Act. “The health care law,” he declared, “has proven to be unpopular, unworkable and unaffordable,” and he predicted “sticker 
shock” in the months ahead.  
So, another week, another denunciation of Obamacare. Who cares? But Mr. 
Barrasso’s remarks were actually interesting, although not in the way he intended. You see, all the recent news on health costs has been good. 
So Mr. Barrasso is predicting sticker shock precisely when serious fears of such a shock are fading fast. Why would he do that?  
Well, one likely answer is that he hasn’t heard any of the good news. Think about it: Who would tell him?  
My guess, in other words, was that Mr. Barrasso was inadvertently illustrating the widening “wonk gap” — the G.O.P.’s near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive. Health care is the most prominent example, but the dumbing down extends across the spectrum, from budget issues to national security to poll 
analysis. Remember, Mitt Romney and much of his party went into Election Day expecting victory.  
About health reform: Mr. Barrasso was wrong about everything, even the 
“unpopular” bit, as I’ll explain in a minute. Mainly, however, he was 
completely missing the story on affordability.  
For the truth is that the good news on costs just keeps coming in. There has been a striking slowdown in overall health costs since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, with many experts giving the law at least partial credit. And we now have a good idea what insurance premiums will be once the law goes fully into effect; a comprehensive survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that on average premiums will be significantly lower than those 
predicted by the Congressional Budget Office when the law was passed.  
But do Republican politicians know any of this? Not if they’re listening to conservative “experts,” who have been offering a steady stream of 
misinformation. All those claims about sticker shock, for example, come from obviously misleading comparisons. For example, 
supposed experts compare average insurance rates under the new system, 
which will cover everyone, with the rates currently paid by a handful of young, healthy people for bare-bones insurance. And they conveniently 
ignore the subsidies many Americans will receive.  
At the same time, in an echo of the Romney camp’s polling fantasies, 
other conservative “experts” are creating false impressions about public opinion. Just after Kaiser released a poll showing a strong majority — 57 percent — opposed to the idea of 
defunding health reform, the Heritage Foundation put out a poster claiming that 57 percent of Americans want reform defunded. Did the experts at Heritage simply 
read the numbers upside down? No, they claimed, they were referring to 
some other poll. Whatever really happened, the practical effect was to 
delude the right-wing faithful.  
And the point is that episodes like this have become the rule, not the 
exception, on the right. How many Republicans know, for example, that 
government employment has declined, not risen, under President Obama? 
Certainly Senator Rand Paul was incredulous when I pointed this out to him on TV last fall. On the contrary, he insisted, “the size of growth of 
government is enormous under President Obama” — which was completely 
untrue but was presumably what his sources had told him, knowing that it was what he wanted to hear.  
For that, surely, is what the wonk gap is all about. Political 
conservatism and serious policy analysis can coexist, and there was a 
time when they did. Back in the 1980s, after all, health experts at 
Heritage made a good-faith effort to devise a plan for universal health coverage — and what they came up with was the system now known as Obamacare.  
But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very 
much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient 
facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low 
measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies 
the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.  
It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway 
cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the 
power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise 
the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests 
in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.    

-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com


 
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