New and Improved. Again

David Brooks has a really funny piece in the New York Times today. It’s not meant to be. But it is. It’s about You-​​Know-​​Who, that lil ol Health Care bill that nobody has read all the way through and that the Democ­rats keep slip­ping in things like:

We will give each state large amounts of money to reduce the amount of med­ical lia­bil­ity lawsuits …

unless

a state actu­ally passes laws lim­it­ing the costs of med­ical lia­bil­ity law­suits, in which case we take the money back.

Hard to pro­mote some­thing like that but Mr. David Brooks man­ages. To do so he makes him­self sound like an idiot, but he’s writ­ing for the New York Times and in that venue some­times that can’t be avoided.

I always liked Brooks. I think it was that pic­ture. The cute lit­tle top knot. And the fact that he man­ages to look so pink even though it also looks like he for­got to shave.

To go through this thing is an exer­cise in see­ing WHAT-​​HE-​​HAD-​​TO-​​WRITE in order to write for the Times.

He starts with an acknowl­edge­ment that the bill is pre­sented on the basis of spend­ing cuts he says Con­gress won’t make, and then says that, based on the spend­ing cuts he says they won’t make, the bill won’t explode the deficit.

He does all this just to get us inter­ested. To let us know he has some really good ones in store.

The first is

the authors have thrown in a mil­lion lit­tle ideas in an effort to reduce cost growth within the cur­rent system.

Fol­lowed by the sen­tence, and I am NOT mak­ing this up:

The fact is, nobody know how to reduce cost growth within the cur­rent sys­tem.

So we know up front that these mil­lion lit­tle ideas (and cute as the dick­ens, every one of them) all scur­ry­ing around the health care bill won’t do any­thing to reduce the growth of the cost of the sys­tem. Any­body want to haz­ard a guess as to what they WILL do?

And it gets bet­ter from there.  How’s this?

If you’ve ever heard about it, it’s in there — improved insur­ance exchanges, pay­ment inno­va­tions, an inde­pen­dent com­mis­sion to cap Medicare pay­ment rates, an inno­va­tion cen­ter, com­par­a­tive effec­tive­ness research. There’s at least a pilot pro­gram for every promis­ing idea.

Ah. Improved insur­ance exchanges. That’ll do it every time. Insur­ance exchanges are a great thing so long as they’re improved.

What, by the way,is an insur­ance exchange? Did one exist before Obama dreamed it up? And how does one IMPROVE upon some­thing which hasn’t pre­vi­ously existed and there­fore hasn’t any per­for­mance which can be IMPROVED upon?

And how DID we ever live with­out Inno­va­tion Cen­ters?  I thought an “inno­va­tion cen­ter” was some­thing like Steve Jobs’ garage.  Or Sergei Brin’s brain.  Or Albert Einstein’s note­book.  Well, I stand cor­rected on this one.  The fed­eral gov­ern­ment is going to build some.

The rest is HERE and is well worth the perusal should you be inclined to expe­ri­ence an extended period of won­der and mirth.

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Tags: healthcare