Obama's Doctor Down on Down Under?

Wouldn't it be weirdly ironic if Republican's adopted single-payer just to thwart Obama? This backbiting interview with an Obama ally reminds me about how much stranger than fiction things can get in real life.

Strangerthat fiction: Obana's doc delivers teh poor diagnosis.

(HuffPo)

"I look at his program and I can't see how it's going to work," Scheiner told the Huffington Post.

"He has no cost control. There would be no effective cost control in his program. The CBO said it's going be incredibly expensive... and the thing that I really am worried about is, if it is the failure that I think it would be, then health reform will be set back a long, long time."

— Dr. David Scheiner, Obama's doctor

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The current House amalgamation: an effort to give everyone the essence of what they want... the pseudo-single-payer insurance policy and a universal-ish public option, competing in a preexisting condition-blind exchange with private insurance products, ALL for a trillion dollars over a decade... $100 billion a year... about the cost of a year in Iraq... It would seem not to be the end of the debate, even if it's signed as legislation.

There's a fear among everyone that one of these options is going to prevail, and maybe not theirs.

Europe's various single-payer and public healthcare systems were devised in the wake of world war wreckage we haven't seen here. It was a shock-doctrine application of emergency aide at a time when people didn't have the luxury to argue ideological preferences that are more psychologically affordable now and before the war.



Indeed, it might be argued that this is what the war was all about in the first place, competing strains of various forms of social and capital interests emerging from that horrible bombardment as a mixed social-capital economy.

"Even Mrs. Thatcher said, 'The Nation health Service is safe in our hands'. It's as non-contoversial as votes for women."

Europe fought and paid a heavy price to find the happy medium they seem to ejoy more than we enjoy being ourselves, and Canada benefited from the Queens apron strings, while Australia appears to have adopted, in 1984, something more similar to the collection of options we debate today.

The robust public option working alongside national and private payer insurance in a well-regulated market. Australia, which ranks seventh in life expectancy, even ahead of Canada, France, and Sweden, may be the over-looked comparison in most debates. Who would argue that they've become a trembling teacup brimming full with pampered effete milquetoast elites?

Obama's doctor is a single-payer purist, but there are examples of a successful hybrid approach that would neither befriend nor be-foe a particular option, exclusively, and why should we?

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