Reality-based conservatism

[nancylebov]

David Frum concludes that same sex marriage doesn't damage heterosexual marriage.

Is there anything else in American politics which is dependent on as weak an argument as opposition to same sex marriage? The war on drugs is based on a wild over-estimation of government power, but it doesn't quite have that weird "I'll make up a definition and insist that it's realer than what can be observed" quality.

Link thanks to nwhyte.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Just as a minor note, by the way, there cannot possibly be hard data about free market health care, because there is no developed country with free market health care. The United States has a huge share of health care provided through Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA, and most of the rest is provided through prepaid group care places that receive massive government subsidies through tax expenditures, and that are also sheltered from competition by state-level regulation of health insurance. That's not remotely what libertarians like me want; we're in favor of changes in American health care roughly as radical as going over to the Canadian approach would be. I understand that this is not what you would want, but if we were going to debate it (which I don't propose to do here), it would have to be on theoretical grounds, because there simply are no observational data on free market systems for you to appeal to.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Two points:

1) Given that we're talking about hard facts and not speculation, what we know for certain is that the more privatized US system is both more expensive (by at least a factor of 2), less effective (in coverage of the populace, effectiveness per insured individual) and less popular and satisfying to users than the state-run healthcare systems of Western Europe. That's data that is exactly as solid as the data on marriage equality. Thus it's clear that if the US adopted a model like the UK healthcare system, costs would drop, while effectiveness and patient satisfaction would increase.

2) In terms of evaluating what we do know about free-market healthcare, the existence of Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA should all actually make other healthcare less expensive in the US, since what is happening is that most of the people in the poorest health (the old, the poor, and many people with serious injuries) are not driving up the cost of more privatized healthcare. Instead, what we have is a system where the rest of US healthcare is only responsible for the people who are in the best health and thus on average require less healthcare.

While it's true that the remainder of US healthcare isn't a complete free market, if you ignore Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA (which as I mentioned above does not either drive up costs or reduce efficiency for the rest of healthcare in the US and in fact should serve to do the reverse), then we have the closest thing to free market healthcare that exists in the first world, and it's utterly dismal (in terms of costs per capita, effectiveness per insured individual, & patient satisfaction) compared to all comparable (ie other first world) alternatives. Given that this is by far the best data we have, that's hardly a glowing argument for free-market healthcare. Combine this with the fact that it's equally clear that it's possible to provide excellent healthcare that is both relatively inexpensive, highly effective, and very well-regarded by users via the Western European model (which slightly is different from the Canadian model), and any argument that purely free-market healthcare would be better than the current US system and at least as good as the various systems in use in Western Europe demands extraordinary proof. I see a remarkable lack of evidence of such proof.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The point is that what we have is as far away from a free market in health care as it is from a single payer system like the UK or Canada. Therefore making inferences about the failure of free market health care from what the United States has is exactly as intellectually sound as making inferences about the failure of socialist health care from what the United States has.

I don't propose to argue the substantive points, or the broader questions of economic theory they raise. Let it stand that we flatly disagree. And I don't really care if you share my views or not; I'm simply pointing out that your conclusions are not based on anything within miles of proper empirical evidence.

Years ago, I read a book on experimental archaeology that discussed the massive inferiority of bronze to iron and steel as material for armor and shields, based on testing a bronze shield. But then I read carefully and saw that the experimenter had not been able to obtain bronze for some reason, and had substituted copper! Because, well, copper was sort of like bronze and was the closest thing to it he could find.

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

There is plenty of evidence about the non-existence of general healthcare in developed countries circa 1925.