Robert Samuelson: Forget Health Care For All

This year Americans want to talk about health care – and most of us want to talk about covering the uninsured and reducing the costs of health care – but often what we get from the media is just cynical double talk. Case in point: a column by Robert Samuelson [1] in the September 10 Washington Post and this week’s Newsweek.

Samuelson starts by arrogantly dismissing Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Democratic Convention call for health care for all. Why? Because “the central health-care problem is not improving coverage. It's controlling costs.”

That’s easy for someone with good insurance from Post-Newsweek to declare. But it also assumes that the challenge of covering everyone and of controlling health inflation are completely separate problems.

Economist Dean Baker devotes some of his American Prospect Beat the Press blog to deconstructing Samuelson’s misleading column [2]:

Robert Samuelson did a classic misrepresentation of data in his column today. He told readers that people spend pretty much the same amount of money on health care regardless of income. He blamed this on government health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid which pick up much of the tab for low-income people. He sees this as a problem because it leads us to spend a great deal on health care procedures that often have little value in terms of improving health.

…The relative equality of spending is hugely driven by age (the elderly largely fall in the bottom quintile), which Samuelson notes in passing. This is important because old people need health care, young people don't. Most young people spend little on health care and they would still spend little on health care even if their incomes increased by a factor of ten. (Do people go to the doctor for fun?) Controlling for age, rich people do spend substantially more on health care than poor people, although not as much more as would be the case without government assistance.

Baker deserves a column in The Post and Newsweek just to correct the errors of a guy who has a monopoly control of precious media real estate. We are going to get a lot more of this: Some mainstream media are giving Sen. John McCain credit for advancing a “plan” for health care, ignoring the fact that his plan would make things vastly worse – by taxing the health benefits of people with good insurance and encouraging employers to withdraw health insurance to millions of employees who are now covered. Samuelson asserts a similar equivalence, concluding that: “the McCain and Obama health-care proposals are either impractical or undesirable.”

American’s want an honest debate about health care, not an arrogant dismissal of the problem. Discussion welcomed.