Today In People Insulting Your Intelligence
- Shorter David Brooks: “If Obama takes unilateral action on immigration, congressional Republicans will stop cooperating with his initiatives!”
- Shorter Lambert Strether: “We would totally have had single-payer if it wasn’t for the meddling of President, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, Secretary of State, Chief Justice of the United States, and longtime don of the Gambino crime family Jonathan Gruber. Also, I have no idea what was actually in the Heritage health care proposal, and think that governors rule Massachusetts like kings.”
ShorterVerbatim Megan McArdle: “So what would I have done, when Obamacare was tanking in the polls and Scott Brown was elected to the Senate on an anti-Obamacare platform? I would have passed something more modest that still significantly expanded coverage, expanding Medicaid to 150 to 200 percent of the poverty line and creating a national high-risk pool to insure anyone who’d been turned down for coverage more than twice in the past 12 months, at prices comparable to what a healthy person of their age would pay in the insurance market. Again, much cheaper, much less intrusive, no blowback from people who lost their policies, and very unlikely to have been tampered with by the Supreme Court.” Oh, yes, the Supreme Court tampering with an expansion of Medicaid — that’s unpossible!
- …and a late but very strong entry from Mr. Fred Hiatt! He can’t have Ron Fournier cornering the market on this kind of “analysis.”