22 May 2007 The Health Care Conversation Continues

The health care conversation with Matthew Holt of the Health Care Blog (see here) continued over there Monday, with a new post in response by Matthew Holt and another by Eric Novack.

Mr. Novack, who does not appear to be of the “condemn America first” school of thought, says advocates of a single-payer system for the United States tend to “speak in broad generalities of fairness and justice and risk pools — which sounds great to the public, but is short on actual policy implementation,” while “limited government advocates have, thus far, been focused on actual concrete steps to improve the system.” He provides more details to back up his view, and the conversation continues with others in the comments.

In his post, Matthew Holt says he’s posting because he’s grumpy, and in any case is just messing with me, so there’s probably little need for me to get into the details (you can read it here if you want to). As has been the case in my conversation with Mr. Holt so far, he continued attributing opinions to me willy-nilly, and then attempted to mow them down. In such a situation, one hardly knows whether to note that one never said anything of the kind, or simply rebut his weak rebuttal.

Mr. Holt did, however, sort-of, slightly attempt just a little bit to explain his use of the term “rent-a-quote” when he complained about the AP quoting David Hogberg, affiliated with the National Center, in an article it ran last week. Unfortunately, Mr. Holt’s explanation (as it does on many other matters) fell a bit short; he referred to an “obituary” as being the clue to the definition and then provided a dead link to a British newspaper.

Correspondents have informed me, however, that Mr. Holt is probably attempting to imply that some unseen (certainly not invisible) hand paid for the National Center’s opinion as expressed by Dr. Hogberg. This would not surprise me. The left in general does tend to try to change the subject to sources of funding (at least, until one asks what theirs are), which we usually take as a sign that they are afraid to debate the real issues. I would be, too, if I were them.

If, however, Mr. Holt suspects that someone in particular is underwriting our health care work, I’d be grateful if he stopped dancing around the term “rent-a-quote” and laid his suspicions on the table. He’d be wrong, but we might learn the name of a new prospective donor to help us warn Americans of the pitfalls of government-run health care. (Speaking of which, donations to the National Center can be made online, and they are tax deductible!)

Meanwhile, Stuart Browning of On the Fence Films weighs in on his own blog and also in the comments. I admit I was surprised when I followed the last link in his post to read what Matthew Holt believes about spending money — even private money? — on health care procedures for the elderly. Mr. Holt, apparently, believes in a “duty to die” philosophy — that funds spent on elderly people who need expensive procedures to stay alive might be better spent elsewhere.

And that, folks, explains the problem with government-run health care in a nutshell.