Conservatives Lack Forward Thinking. So It Goes.

Bah-rousing the hinterland of the internet I landed on this page (Harry's Place) and found this article to be curious.

Curious enough to breakdown.

Intro:

The conservative wing of the Republican Party has come full circle. Republican conservatives once overwhelmingly opposed the creation of Medicare (the government health care organization for Americans 65 years and older). Now they’ve decided Medicare is not so bad after all.

I think we know where this is going. Namely (and lamely), conservatives are always behind the progressive curve.

But soon afterwards, the conservative ascent began in the party. Conservatives were never happy with the idea of providing government medical help, so the Road to Damascus conversion lately by conservative Republicans must be taken with a grain of salt. The Republicans are trying their best to undermine the Obama Administration’s attempt at overhauling America’s health care system.

Let's nip this in the bud early. First off, liberals are just as prone to changing their minds too. Now that we've got this off our collective chests, there's a problem with this paragraph. It presupposes, by using the word "undermines" that no counter-arguments by conservatives/GOP is legitimate. It also seems to suggest conservatives are acting like they did in the 1960s: They were wrong then and they haven't learn anything.

Can it be Conservatives made a simple calculation? Faced with medicare and its major problems and adding a bill that would eventually lead to a public health system, conservatives simply said live with the devil you know.

The bigger indiscretion here is the author is dismissing outright the possibility that citizens on arrived at their own conclusions - which happen to be in line with the Republicans.

That they "embrace" medicare now doesn't follow that medicare was a good idea.

In the early 1960s, Ronald Reagan complained that if something like Medicare was implemented, it would lead to the end of freedom as Americans know it.

In 1964 the GOP presidential candidate and conservative icon Barry Goldwater said that the upcoming Medicare legislation was a giveaway: “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink?”

Fundamentally, at its individualistic level, to many, Goldwater and Reagan were not that off the mark. Is the author implying these notions are irrelevant if not wrong? We're already legislating - or attempting to - laws against smokers and drinkers. What the author is missing is he's part of the 1984 storyline.

He disclosed a clip of Reagan from 1961 - when he was still a Democrat.

In 1995, the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress under Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich proposed a 14 percent cut across the board in Medicare spending. Likewise Gingrich, speaking at a Blue Cross/Blue Shield conference in 1995, compared Medicare to a Soviet style bureaucracy (although Gingrich obviously forgot that Medicare manages to run at a 3 percent overhead compared to 30 percent overhead costs in the private US health care system).

By this point, this piece is a he said, she said thing. I will say this: I have a feeling his own facts are selective. A 27% discrepancy between government and private sector? I would love to break down those numbers and what they entail. I'm sure, in part, that private figure is because of a direct result of government red tape imposed on it. Didn't medicare cost $3 billion and would cost $12 billion by 1990? Where does it stand now? 107 billion according to freedom-loving Walter E. Williams.

If some Republicans have had a genuine change of heart about Medicare, that is indeed good news. Because Medicare is one government program that is not only well-received by voters but which actually works.

Before 1965 and Medicare, more than half of all Americans over 65 had no health insurance at all and one in three lived in poverty. Since 1965, nearly all seniors have access to health care and poverty among the elderly is around 14 percent.

Pyrrhic victory, mebbe? Again, I'm sure there's more to these figures. I hear fluffy figures that stubbornly stand against reality about the Canadian public system all the time.


It appears Republicans believe they have found a way to gain political points at Obama’s expense. How ironic that it would be with a government program which, if many of them had their way, would never have existed in the first place.

Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.

Again, this doesn't prove anything. Conservatives still don't believe in big government but that tide is so massive they have no hope in stemming it any longer. Which is why some in the GOP are big spenders. Like conservatives here, it's the "thing to do." Tax and spend for example.

Conclusion:

We don't need to truly assess anything since we know this to be right because once upon a time, with the help of conservatives, we brought in Medicare and it works - if you can make the numbers fit and keep the proper ideological bent to defend a Pyrrhic victory.

ABOVE ALL:

The Democrats don't need the Republicans to push forward their bill. Listening to them fail all by themselves while blaming "scare tactics" is in itself worthy of a sentence in a Kafka novel.

I like this from a commenter. In fact, all the comments are a fun read:

I like the idea of socialised medicine because of its universal nature and benefits of scale, but I don’t like the idea of a single provider because of the inefficiencies a lack of competition creates. Instead of having a single provider, the government should fund three competing vendors and let the public decide with their feet, the more punters a provider gets through its doors, the more funding it gets.