What passes for policy debate in America today

The following sentence from an article about a study released by health insurers is hardly encouraging:

Democrats and their allies scrambled on Monday to knock down a new
industry-funded study forecasting that Senate legislation, over time, will
add thousands of dollars to the cost of a typical policy.

And sure enough, what follows in the article is not an argument on the merits, but rather:

"Distorted and flawed," said White House spokeswoman Linda Douglass.
"Fundamentally dishonest," said AARP's senior policy strategist, John Rother. "A
hatchet job," said a spokesman for Senate Finance Committee chairman Max
Baucus, D-Mont.

But what exactly is so "Fundamentally dishonest?"

At the heart of the industry's complaint is a decision by lawmakers to weaken the requirement that millions more Americans get coverage. Since the legislation would ban insurance companies from denying coverage on account of poor health, many people will wait to sign up until they get sick, the industry says. And that will drive up costs for everybody else.

Isn't that kind of a no-brainer? Why pay for health insurance when you're not sick if you can just wait and get it when you are? If the government forces insurers to provide insurance on the spot without limitation for covering illness or injury that they already had, they will be creating an incentive for people to go without insurance. People will only sign up when they are getting ready to submit claims.

If you are an insurer, what rate should you charge if many of your policyholders are only ever signing up for coverage when they are ready to submit a claim? Hint: the answer is it will cost more than today. If you are an insurer, and you used to deny some claims because they were submitted for pre-existing conditions, and you now have to pay additional money for those claims, how much should you then charge? Hint: the answer is it will cost more than today.

There can certainly be a debate as to how much premiums will go up, but ceteris paribus, they will go up.

The real "distortion" in this case is the White House calling a report that points out an important aspect of health care policy that they are trying to gloss over a distortion. The real fundamental dishonesty is for the AARP to call such a common sense application of the incentives people will face "Fundamental dishonesty." The real hatchet job is for Sen. Baucus to not to come out and acknowledge the (unintended?) consequences of his legislation, but to instead call a report that does a "hatchet job."

How discouraging that the White House, the AARP, and the Chairman of the Senate Finance committee are avoiding an honest, rationale, discussion of the impacts of health care reform.

Ellsworth Monkton Krugman

I think anyone with half a brain and enough time spent following American politics would agree that there is "over-the-top" opposition on both the left and the right towards the other side. If that premise is correct (and I think it is), then to suggest otherwise means that someone either:

1. is stupid
2. is uninformed
3. is twisting the truth to present the portion of it that they want you to see.

If I had to bet, I'd go with option #3 for Paul Krugman. In his recent NY times piece, he not only isolates Republicans as being "so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?" he also generalizes any opposition into the "essential truth about the state of American politics" that "the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple."

Being a Republican, which Krugman is not, I prefer to speak for myself. I am not guided by pure spite, or even impure spite. I chose the Republican party in my early twenties because I thought they were the closest philosophically to my view of the role of government: a limited one. I thought the Republicans were at their best in the mid 90's when they fought for limited government, and at their worst a decade later when they spent like big-government fools during W's two terms.

Back to Krugman, he conveniently leaves out any Democrats that have been over the top. Would it be fair for someone on the right to pluck a few choice quotes from ACORN, for example, and generalize all Democrats accordingly?

He writes "Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years." Or the Bush years, maybe? Was there no over-the-top opposition then?

To call someone out when they go over the top is certainly fair game. To imply that it's only one party that does so, however, is the work of a spin doctor. It's a piece that I think Ellsworth Toohey, the antagonist in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" would have been proud of.