Unless you live in a cave, you’ll know that Sarah Palin has a new career as an op-ed writer. Which is to say, she’s got a ghostwriter banging out op-eds for her. The latest appeared in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. I won’t bother with a full takedown, but a look at her CATO Institute-provided health care reform plan is illuminating:(P)roviding Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines.
The last suggestion is the most creepy. What Palin endorses is the idea of allowing insurance companies to do what credit cards have done: flee to the states with the least regulation. That might affect price, but without federal accountability it is more likely to adversely affect standards of care. The reason almost all credit cards are issued from Delaware is because that state has the weakest usury laws in the world; do we really want that race to the bottom with our insurance policies?
I’ve already done a full treatment of the red herring known as tort reform, but it’s worth noting the president touched on it last night — while adding, “I don’t think it’s a silver bullet.” Indeed, there’s no evidence whatsoever that tort reform would save “billions each year” in wasteful spending.
But the suggestion of giving Medicare recipients vouchers is a truly outrageous idea. Palin is essentially offering to undo Medicare, replacing the efficient 3-4% administrative costs of the program with the inefficient 20-30% admin price of private insurance. That would basically turn the entire system into Medicare Advantage, the very program Obama would end to save hundreds of billions from the Medicare budget.
Yet what interests me most is not her bogus reform plan, which would do virtually nothing to rein in costs. What I find most intriguing is that her op-eds and Facebook “notes” aren’t the usual word-salad — these are the most obvious examples of ghostwriting in American politics. My gut tells me she’s getting her copy from somewhere within the think-tank apparatus.
