I can’t think of anyone I’d rather read on health care reform than Betsy Newmark, a frumpy high school teacher and quiz bowl coach from an overwhelmingly white charter school in North Carolina. For those who may not hold the same interest in reading Ms. Newmark’s musings on health care, here’s the executive summary: “Just like you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, you can’t have a good health care system without letting a few poor people die.”
Betsy’s launching pad for her lunatic ideas on health care is a Wall Street Journal article that she selectively quotes to suggest that the French health care system is on the verge of collapse. In particular, she latches on to this statement:
The problem is that Assurance Maladie has been in the red since 1989. This year the annual shortfall is expected to reach €9.4 billion ($13.5 billion), and €15 billion in 2010, or roughly 10% of its budget.
Let’s put that into some needed context, shall we, before we start peddling disaster scenarios. Here’s a chart on the evolution of Assurance Maladie’s deficit straight from la bouche de cheval, i.e. Assurance Maladie itself:
Source: Assurance Maladie, Chiffres & repères 2007
As you can see, the deficit of the French health care system began to be systematically and significantly reduced starting in 2005. So why the sudden increase to 9.4 billion euros in 2009? Well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or even a quiz bowl coach to guess: the economic crisis and the unemployment caused by it. Duh. Of course, in France, unemployment doesn’t result in more uninsured people as it does in the United States, but it does mean less payments to Assurance Maladie et, voilà, a bigger deficit for Assurance Maladie. To project these deficits, caused by current increases in unemployment, to increase indefinitely into the future is une montagne of merde de taureau.
More context: the French deficit for 2008 was 65.9 billion euros or 3.4% of France’s GDP. Assurance Maladie’s deficit is only 14 percent of the entire deficit or 0.47 percent of the GDP. Those are not numbers, even were they to continue, that would force France to choose between hocking the Eiffel Tower or throwing old ladies with cancer out onto the cobblestones.
But, oh no, Ms. Quiz Bowl Coach thinks that providing 100 percent coverage will be the end of the space-time continuum as we now know it:
And once we start down that road, we’ll find that, like France, it becomes politically impossible for a democracy to cut costs. Too many people will become accustomed, as the French have, to seeing low-cost health care as their right and scream bloody murder if politicians try to trim costs.
That’s all well and good for the recipients of that 100% coverage, but it is not economically feasible in the long run.
Bzzzzzzzzt. Wrong answer, Ms. Newmark. Your team loses 50 points. Nothing in your figures warrants any conclusions about what is economically feasible in the long run.
More importantly, our quiz bowl whiz is saying straight out that the problem is having everyone insured. Health care, she thinks, is a zero-sum game, and every Viagra pill given to an unemployed person is a Viagra pill taken away from her husband (although I suspect that more than a blue pill would have to be involved to convince him to roll over in the marital bed and have at it with Betsy).
Once again, the only argument that these wingnuts have against health care reform and universal coverage boils down to this: “I’ve got mine, bitchez. Sucks to be you.”
