A Twofer Tuesday M2RB: Depeche Mode and Dr. Strangelove's Theme Song
"Some Ideas Are So Stupid That Only Intellectuals Believe Them."
- George Orwell, accredited
"Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face."
- General Jack D. Ripper
(Soph:
Paging Alex Jones! Mr Alex Jones, would you please pick up the white,
fluoridation-free, courtesy phone, STAT? General Ripper has been
unable to reach you on your double-secret decoder ring.)
No, Professor Gruber, Obamacare Won't Boost the Economy!!!
The father of PPACA peddles piffle about the economic impact of
his progeny.
George Orwell is often credited with writing, "Some ideas are so
stupid that only intellectuals believe them." As it happens, Orwell
didn't pen those words. That much-used aphorism merely paraphrases
a pithy but somewhat less glib observation he made in a 1945 essay
titled, "Notes on Nationalism." Still, it nicely captures a
proclivity peculiar to the luminaries of academia, the "news" media
and progressive think tanks: a willingness to believe things that
no ordinary person would be foolish enough to credit. A textbook
case of this phenomenon can be found in a recent column published
in the New Republic by Jonathan Gruber.
Gruber is a Professor of Economics at MIT and has been dubbed,
by Avik Roy and others, "the intellectual father of Obamacare."
Thus, it will come as no shock that he spends a good deal of his
time defending the health care "reform" law. What does surprise is
that Gruber, who is a first class economist and a genuine
intellectual, continues to write astonishingly stupid things about
the dangerous and destructive creature he sired. In his
TNR piece, for example, he
advises us, "[W]e know that the ACA will increase jobs in the
medical sector in the short run, above and beyond any partial
offsets from new excise taxes on that sector."
Assuming that Gruber isn't employing the majestic plural in that
sentence, it begs the question: Who's "we"? He can't be including
anyone actually working in health care. Those of us who labor in
those vineyards know that his brainchild is actually killing
medical sector jobs by the thousands. All across the nation,
hospitals are slashing payrolls in preparation for the $155 billion
in payment cuts to which industry lobbyists agreed in a 2009
Faustian
bargain on Obamacare. The largest expense in any hospital's
budget is labor, so they are reluctantly resorting to reductions in
force (RIF) to balance the books.
In February, for example, officials at Jackson Memorial in Miami
said the hospital would RIF more than 1,000 workers. Such
layoffs have a profoundly negative effect on local economies, where
hospitals often rank among the largest employers. Nonetheless, the
list of casualties grows. RIFs have recently been
announced at Pennsylvania's Crozer-Keystone Health System, New
York's Sheehan Health Network, Tennessee's Erlanger Health System,
Oregon's Silverton Health, Maryland's Adventist HealthCare,
Arizona's Yuma Regional Medical Center, California's Queen of the
Valley Medical Center, ad infinitum.
Somehow, one doubts that the victims of these RIFs would agree
with Gruber's claim that "ACA will increase jobs in the medical
sector." Moreover, despite his attempt to pass lightly over "new
excise taxes," these will contribute greatly to the economic
carnage. Obamacare levies a 2.3 percent tax on medical device
manufacturers beginning in 2013. How do businesses react when a
government raises the cost of doing business in this way? They go
elsewhere. Last year Boston Scientific, which manufactures
defibrillators, pacemakers, and stents,
announced a RIF of 1,200 to 1,400 jobs and "disclosed it was…
hiring 1,000 people in China."
So, Obamacare's medical device tax has forced Boston Scientific
to outsource American jobs to a far away country whose Communist
leaders are more business-friendly than the President of the United
States. And this trend will continue. The Massachusetts Medical
Device Industry Council
estimates that about 90 percent of its members will cut back on
"operational costs and jobs" after the tax takes effect. This is
what Gruber calls "partial offsets from new excise taxes." The
people who lose their jobs at Boston Scientific and other medical
device manufacturers will likely employ less euphemistic terms like
"layoff" and "bankruptcy."
How can Gruber be blind to all of this? The first part of the
answer lies in his apparent failure to grasp the significance of
the recent Supreme Court ruling. He writes, "the law will result in
more than 30 million additional Americans getting health
insurance," having apparently forgotten that nearly 20 million of
those newly insured patients were going to be covered by a vastly
expanded Medicaid program. But the Court struck down the section of
Obamacare that would have forced the states to implement the
coercive Medicaid mandate, and many governors have already
announced that they have no intention of expanding the program.
Combined with a similar
reluctance to implement the law's insurance exchanges, this
refusal by the states to expand Medicaid could keep the number of
newly insured patients well under 10 million. This means that
Gruber's predictions about a spike in demand for medical workers
are delusional. And his notions about "uninsured consumers" who
"set aside money in low interest liquid accounts to make sure they
have enough to cover unexpected medical costs" caused me to laugh
aloud when I read it. To quote Orwell's actual words,
"One has to
belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no
ordinary man could be such a fool."
- George Orwell, 1945
Now that we're back to Orwell, it's worth pointing out that he
long ago explained
the second reason a smart guy like Gruber can produce such a
purblind analysis of Obamacare's economic effects: "At any given
moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed
that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is
not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is
'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not
done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady." Among the
intelligentsia of our time, it is "not done" to question the
virtues of Obamacare, particularly if you helped beget the
beast.
If Gruber so far forgot himself as to challenge progressive
orthodoxy on Obamacare, he would soon find himself ostracized. He
would be publicly vilified as Senator Joe Lieberman was when he
refused to parrot liberal pieties about Iraq. He might even be
denounced by his MIT colleagues as Larry Summers was by the faculty
of Harvard for committing a far less conspicuous act of heresy.
Thus, even if Gruber were introspective enough to see that he has
been wrong all along, he would probably never admit it. He would
just continue to write stupid things like "The Affordable Care Act
will boost the economy."
No comments:
Post a Comment