Yesterday I posted one of my recent cartoons, which suggested that a health care system like ours would be run by the evil Empire, from Star Wars.
Today, Ezra Klein reports about a Senate health care hearing:
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) says that he’s not sure who wrote the Affordable Health Choices Act but that if you put “Rube Goldberg, Karl Marx, and Ira Magaziner in a room,” you’d have ended up with something pretty close. A classy, gracious line from the man who was nearly Obama’s secretary of commerce.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) shoots back, “Our current system is a combination of Adam Smith, Darth Vader, and the Bodysnatchers. So I like our plan better!”
Well gosh, I’m not sure who Rube Goldberg and Ira Magaziner are, but those sound like super scary Jewish names so therefore it must be communist and evil.
Denise,
Wikipedia:
I had heard of Magaziner but had to look up the name to remember where I’d heard it: he was part of Hillary Clinton’s health care task force, which Republicans had great success in killing and is the cautionary tale for anyone trying to reform the system today.
I don’t think Gregg was trying to make even a subliminal point about Jews; he was just claiming that the proposal combines Marxism, over-complication and HillaryCare. It can be potentially unfair to assume that because you don’t know who is being referenced, that the speaker’s target audience won’t either and therefore he’s just trying to use those names for racial bias. Rube Goldberg machines are pretty well known, and Ira Magaziner is notorious among Republicans for his prior health care work.
Yes, I’m sure you’re right. But it did leap off the page at me.
I’ll bet you a dime they’re both right.
I’ll have that dime joe. No way would Marx have proposed a healthcare system which upholds the commodification of health by still supporting insurance companies.
Barbara Mikulski is like my favorite person on the planet.
Marx was all about the public option, Ira got that stuff in when he wasn’t looking and Rube made it all so comlicated that Karl didn’t realize until it was too late.
Current system has problems, new system will have problems. No such thing as a perfect sytsem. Best we can do is pick which problems we want.
Best we can do is pick which problems we want.
The problem I’m dealing with right now is that a patient of mine is in danger of being denied a potentially life saving procedure because she has no insurance. No, it’s not me that’s doing the denying. I’ll take bureaucracy if it means that this sort of thing happens less often.
One might also note that we have massive bureaucracy in health care already. Frankly, having only one set of irrational forms and rules to deal with instead of N where N is the number of insurances you have to cope with would make life easier.