Martin Feldstein, a brilliant conservative economist, has his facts wrong on the health care debate in an op-ed he penned today in the Washington Post.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight concisely explains Feldstein’s error:
Take a look at this:
Obama has said that he would favor a British-style “single payer” system in which the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are salaried but that he recognizes that such a shift would be too disruptive to the health-care industry. The Obama plan to have a government insurance provider that can undercut the premiums charged by private insurers would undoubtedly speed the arrival of such a single-payer plan.
Feldstein is simply mistaken here. “Single-payer” has to do with who pays for health care (in the case of single-payer, the federal government does). It has absolutely nothing to do with who provides health care. It’s the difference between the Canadian system, in which private doctors and hospitals are paid by the Canadian government (and indirectly, Canadian taxpayers) to provide health care to its citizenry, and the British system, in which the providers themselves — doctors, nurses, hospital administrators — are actually in the employ of Her Majesty’s Government. For that matter, it’s the difference between Medicare — a single-payer system for American seniors — and the British system. The Canadian system is nationalized health insurance. The British system is nationalized health care — or if you prefer, socialized medicine.
Obama has never expressed or implied any admiration for the British system of socalized medicine. Not that there aren’t admirable elements of it — but I doubt that you’d find even very many self-identified liberals who would suggest that it’s the right system for America. Obama, rather, has expressed admiration for a government-run monopoly on insurance — single-payer — as do about half of Americans in opinion polls.
Got it? Get it? Good.
Paul Secunda:
Paul Secunda joined the Marquette University Law School as an associate professor of law in the summer of 2008. He teaches employment discrimination, employee benefits, labor law, employment law, civil procedure, and seminars in special education law, global issues in employee benefits, and public employment law. Professor Secunda is the author of nearly three dozen books, treatises, articles, and shorter writings. He is also the author, along with Rick Bales and Jeff Hirsch, of the treatise, Understanding Employment Law, along with Sam Estreicher and Rosalind Connor, of the case book, Global Issues in Employee Benefits Law, and of the Teacher’s Manual to the 14th Edition of the Cox, Bok, Gorman & Finkin Labor Law casebook.Professor Secunda is a frequent commentator on labor and employment law issues in the national media and has written numerous columns and op-eds for the National Law Journal and Legal Times. He co-edits with Rick Bales and Jeffrey Hirsch the Workplace Prof Blog, recently named one of the top law professor blogs in the country, which is part of the Law Professors Blog Network.
This article originally appeared at Workplace Prof Blog and is reprinted here with permission from the author.
