Nocera buries his nutgraf as the last one:
It would be nice if we could treat the Ryan plan not as an object of derision but as a launching off point for a serious debate. That way, maybe for once we could avert a crisis instead of acting shocked when it finally arrives.Nice? Even if the cost savings of Obamacare are overrated, Ryan's opposed those savings. Ryan would shit bricks on Nocera's desk over the idea of national health insurance regulation, complete with a Washington bureau or agency.
Nocera then refuses to consider Ryan's idea within the larger context of Ryan's Randian political philosophy. And, that's why it is NOT and cannot be, the "launching off point for a serious debate."
Well, so far, Nocera's yet to measure up to the moderate but not too high standards of his NYT columnist predecessor, Frank Rich.
Charles Blow, his colleague, gets it much more nearly right, when he says:
This is not to say that Medicare isn’t in crisis. It is. But, we don’t have to gut it to save it.But, Ryan wants to gut it. After sucking the brains out of people like Nocera.
o, i dunno. what about this paragraph?:
ReplyDelete"I was not won over, just as I had not often been won over by Jack Kemp’s various enthusiasms. Not that I expected to be. The Ryan plan, which would give seniors a fixed amount they can use to buy health insurance, would undoubtedly shift the cost burden over time from the government to seniors themselves, making health care far less affordable for millions of people. Ryan says that “empowering” health care consumers will help control costs, but that’s absurd: Medicare itself has far more pricing power than the people who actually need treatment."
granted he didn't say all he cd've sd or all we might want him to say. but it's not a "paean to ryan."