Only In America, According To Senator Grassley

CNN:

The Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday rejected two amendments to include a government-run public health insurance option in the only compromise health care bill so far…

It is hardly profound to assert that intellectual honesty is obviously not important to many a politician, but this is taking dishonesty and/or ignorance and reducing them to a whole new level.  For it is one thing to disagree with a “public option”: that is a valid opinion and holding it is perfectly reasonable.  But it is entirely something else to couch the disagreement in bald-faced, “the debate is over” terms that make you sound, to anyone else who has lived elsewhere, or even reads the net, as if you inhabit a cocoon and know embarrassingly little to nothing about anywhere else.

And, even worse, you seem determined to make no effort to learn.  And are proud of it.  Moreover, there we were, thinking Democrats were the party of intellectual smarminess?

For why, 60 years after the creation of the NHS, does private insurance coverage choice exist now in Britain?  And how can it possibly be growing?  Apparently, factoids about which we should not ask:

…”A government-run plan will ultimately force private insurers out of business,” [Sen] Grassley said, adding that the federal government would run the plan and run the market in which the plan competes.

“It will come to a single payer,” he said of a government-run system for all. “That denies the American people choice.”…

And fingers snap: that’s that.  Regardless of truthfulness, simply spouting it supposedly makes it “fact.”  But given how this humble blog has just noted (for the umpteenth time) that that is far from the case, on what “fact” does the Senator base his flippant, ignorant certainty?

Indeed, that the existence of Medicare since 1965 coincides with the rise of the incredible variety of choice in private insurance? Private insurance that many Medicare recipients also avail themselves of as “top up” additional coverage? Just as many do in (supposedly) “single payer” Britain, when they “go private” in concert with National Health?

Undoubtedly we shouldn’t ask about all that either, but just accept what he states unquestioningly.  Because Sen Grassley knows public — meaning, essentially, adding the choice of a Medicare-like program for those under 65 who don’t have private insurance — will “force private insurers out of business.”

And precisely how does he know that?  No need to ask him.  He just knows.

[Posted 5 PM NY time.]