Peggy vs. Sully

Peggy Noonan has a column out today about how the Democrats’ proposed “invention of a huge new entitlement carrying huge new costs” is “terrifying” voters. She makes some good points about Democrats’ unseemly disdain for actual voters with actual concerns. Still, Andrew Sullivan is not impressed with her take on the underlying issue:

Where is there an entitlement? There is an effort to subsidize private insurance for the working poor who now increase healthcare costs with emergency room care. The cost of all this is around $1 trillion over ten years and the struggle is finding ways to pay for it. The reason for the price-tag and its future is that healthcare costs keep sky-rocketing – something that is killing US companies as well who have to compete with international rivals who have to pay for no healthcare for their employees. Noonan makes no reference to this, as if the most pressing issue of future fiscal sanity is something we should put off … because of fiscal conservatism. Excuse me? Now recall the Republicans’ last major initiative on healthcare – the prescription drug benefit. That cost $32 trillion over the long run, and there was not even a gesture toward actually financing it. Much of the right was silent – as they were over all the other fiscally reckless policies of the past eight years.

But only now is Peggy “terrified”.

She is not terrified by massively escalating healthcare costs, which are bankrupting the government and the private sector. She doesn’t mention these once in her know-nothing column. She just channels the “feelings” of others and wants that to guide public policy. She does not mention the crises on many people’s lives because of our current healthcare system. In fact, there is not a scintilla of a constructive proposal in the column – just an amorphous sense that anything that costs money shouldn’t happen now.

Sullivan’s point about poor, uninsured people “who now increase healthcare costs with emergency room care” is a crucial one. Opponents of a strong government role in the health-care system almost universally fail to acknowledge that government already has a tremendously strong role in the health-care system, including its role in effectively subsidizing that guaranteed “free” emergency room care for the poor and uninsured. Indeed, if you listen to enough rank-and-file conservatives, you’ll eventually hear someone explain — with a straight face — that our current health-care system doesn’t actually need all that much reform, and certainly doesn’t need to be “socialized,” because, after all, if you really need care, you can get it for “free” at the emergency room! They honestly say this like it’s a good thing, like it’s a selling point for the status quo, and like that extremely expensive care is actually “free”! The ignorance is staggering, the inconsistency and intellectual incoherence stunning: I’m against government-run universal health care because we don’t need it, because we already have [an incredibly cost-ineffective form of] universal health care, namely “free” E.R. care [courtesy of the government!!!]

This sort of misinformation and ignorance is a big part of the reason Democrats are so frustrated, but they need to do less bashing of protesters and more actual, you know, educating of citizens. Where is Obama’s rhetorical skill when we need it? The “liberal Reagan” certainly isn’t living up to his billing when it comes to selling health-care reform. As for Peggy Noonan and her colleagues in the conservative intelligentsia, they should address the valid points that Sullivan, and many others on the center-left, are making. It’s quite possible there’s a legitimate conservative argument that effectively rebuts them, but for the most part, I’m not hearing it. Instead, the Left’s extremely valid concerns about the unsustainability of our present system (or an only slightly modified version thereof, as opposed to a massively overhauled version) are being largely ignored, in favor of arguments that compare the Democrats’ alternative to a perfect system, or to a distorted and dishonestly presented version of the present system, rather than to the system we now have, accurately described.