Socialized Medicine? From Republicans?
By Matt Miller
Fortune
May 2, 2005
What do General Motors’ woes, the Medicare prescription-drug law, the state and local health-care time bomb…, and Congress’s recent refusal to trim soaring state Medicaid subsidies have in common? They’re all stones on the path toward the nationalization of health-care spending-an idea that’s so easy to slam politically yet so sensible for business that only Republicans can sell it! Before everyone screams, please note that I said health-care spending, not delivery. There’s a difference.
…there’s a potential common agenda lurking beneath today’s health-cost angst. Think of it as a two-step: First, we’d move a chunk of private-sector health costs to government, something business and labor could embrace as a competitiveness booster. Then we’d find ways to guarantee coverage for all while reengineering health-care delivery to lower costs in the long term (without the price controls that stall innovation abroad). Easier said than done, you may say. But seen in this context, the prescription-drug bill last year was the first step in the Republican-led socialization of health spending. Companies have been clobbered funding retiree health plans. The GOP felt their pain, and presto, $750 billion over ten years moved from private to public budgets.
The bigger hurdle may be stereotypes. Business’s sensible drive to get Uncle Sam to take on more of the health burden will run into the nihilistic (but potent) “big government” rhetoric of the GOP-plus the party’s delusion that we can keep federal taxes at 17% to 18% of GDP as the boomers retire. If Republican pols want to help Republican CEOs solve their biggest problems, this caricature of a political philosophy will have to give way to something more grown-up. Just as the Nixon-to-China theory of history says it will ultimately take a Democratic President to fix Social Security, it may take a Republican President to bless the socialization of health spending we need.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,1050964,00.html
Comment: It has been said many times. The liberals will educate the nation on the advantages of a universal, publicly funded health insurance program, but it will be the conservatives who enact it. The pro-business argument for it is just too persuasive.