On assumptions
I don’t spend much time on health care policy. But this following from the National Review blog — suggesting we assume away the problem — is really astonishing:
There simply are no longer genuinely “poor” people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you’re poor today, it’s almost always for behavioral reasons - behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the “needy” out there that only the government can rescue.
Its true: if we assume there are no such thing as poor people, many of the nation’s problems are much easier to solve. Even better, if we assume that we won’t get sick, we don’t even need a health care system at all.
This kind of writing is a sad parody of neo-classical economic reasoning. Academics do make assumptions sometimes to simplify a problem. But no one who is responsible or an adult thinker thinks that that makes the assumptions true.