Megan McArdle announces her support for government-run health care

Erik Kain

Erik writes about video games at Forbes and politics at Mother Jones. He's the contributor of The League though he hasn't written much here lately. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter.

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7 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    If we say that people who don’t post pictures of their wedding dresses are evil, maybe we can get her to post a picture of herself in a wedding dress!Report

  2. Mark says:

    She sure is a poor water-carrier for “libertarianism”. In one week, she can be both heartless and self-contradictory.Report

  3. Patrick says:

    I’m glad to see the Atlantic branching out from the usual New York-DC axis groupthink. Where else could a libertarian like McArdle, or a conservative like Andrew Sullivan, be published these days?Report

  4. Trumwill says:

    Errr, she’s referring to social work and not health care, right? She expressly says that one of the reasons for government-run social services is that it targets only one marginalized segment of the population and therefore private enterprise does not have much incentive to please the consumer. That’s not the case with private health care providers who (usually) provide care to a much wider swath of the population and so cost is not quite as primary a consideration.

    I assume you’re being too clever for me.Report

  5. Trumwill says:

    Ahhh, I’ve always had blind spots when it comes to facetiousness, sarcasm, and messing around. My apologies.Report

  6. Art Deco says:

    I think all of the nursing homes in my home town other than Monroe Community Hospital are run by philanthropies or commercial companies. I think I would be very skeptical that private facilities operating on a combination of private pay and re-imbursements via Medicaid and the purveyors of long-term care insurance provide worse care for the money than the Community Hospital. She also neglects that in these circumstances, the relatives of the inmate are commonly quite involved parties. You may retain a residual option in these circumstances (difficult to exercise, I think), to transfer grandma from one facility to another. What if all of the facilities are operated by the county government?Report