Today brings a sharp contrast in political philosophies and economic reality. As Paul Krugman discourses on three decades of Republican attempts to shrink government and “drown it in the bathtub,” President Obama discloses his intention to stop feeding the free-market monster that has devoured American health care.
In advance of Thursday’s summit, the White House leaks a proposal to oversee and limit double-digit health insurance rate increases such as those the President denounced in his weekly address Saturday.
Legislation introduced last week by Sen. Dianne Feinstein would create a seven-member rate board, the Health Insurance Rate Authority–consumer, industry and medical representatives and experts in health economics–to determine which increases are justifiable and which are unconscionable by insurers who are siphoning off one out of every three dollars spent for “overhead” and profit.
This attempt, finally, to rein in a greedy industry, along with restrictions on denying care to policy holders, should become the centerpiece of streamlined reform legislation to replace last year’s fiasco of a bill.
Its thrust, to protect Americans from private greed, is revealing in the light of GOP efforts to “protect” them from their own government, starting in the Reagan era.
The starve-the-beast strategy, Krugman writes, was “a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.”