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| Fed Cuts by 0.5 Point | Conservatives Jumped to Support Chemerinsky |
Dueling Health Plans
by Christopher Chantrill
September 19, 2007 at 9:27 am
THIS WEEK Senator Clinton (D-NY) announced her new approach to health care, report Patrick Healy and Robin Toner in The New York Times. Trying to avoid the fate of Hillary 1.0, version 2.0 is called “The American Health Choices Plan.” As Healy and Toner put it:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled a plan on Monday to guarantee health insurance to all Americans, but in a way carefully designed to avoid the political flaws in her failed proposal of 1993-94.
Not so coincidentally, Karl Rove wrote up his Rx for health care on the Wall Street Journal edit page. Conservatives can win against Clinton’s “government-heavy” plan, he insists:
Conservatives must put forward reforms aimed at putting the patient in charge. Increasing competition will ensure greater access, lower costs and more innovation.
In case the Republican presidential candidates didn’t get the point, he proceeded to map out a seven point plan. Call it Rove 2.0.
Well. It is clear that Clinton’s plan is a lot less disruptive than the last one. But it will increase government control and mandates. And by expanding “Medicare, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program,” as Jacob Laksin points out, it will also increase the number of people with their health care subsidized by government.
There is one thing all Americans are agreed upon. We want good quality health care. But we quail at the idea of paying for it.
There are two approaches to health provision. One approach is the pre-paid one, that wants all health care provided from a monthly payment. Obviously, this approach must involve some sort of rationing. Liberals and Democrats are in favor of this.
The other approach is self-financing. You pay for your health care and protect your assets with a high-deductible insurance policy. Conservatives and Republicans prefer this.
In the middle, of course, is the great mass of Americans. These Americans just want health care when they need it. And if Hillary Clinton proposes to make someone else pay for it, what’s not to like?
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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