DEFYING THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

From the business section of the New York Times courtesy of Ezra Klein courtesy of Eschaton:

Health Care Problem? Check the American Psyche

The economic case for a single-payer system is surprisingly strong. Start with what we already know. Countries with single-payer systems have long records of spending less on health care than the United States does. The United States spent an average of $6,102 a person on it in 2004, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, while Canada spent $3,165 a person, France $3,159, Australia $3,120 and Britain just $2,508.

At the same time, life expectancy in the United States, a broad measure of health, was slightly lower than it was in those other countries in 2004, the latest year for which complete figures are available. And the United States had a higher rate of infant mortality.

And

Despite everything that is known about the economic benefits of a single-payer system, there’s one big stumbling block: many Americans don’t believe in it. They have heard horror stories from abroad, often spread by partisan advocates, focusing on worst-case examples. Such tales play upon the aversion of many Americans to government involvement in the economy.

Click here for the rest.

Health care aside as a specific issue for the moment, this is something that really frustrates me. As far as I can tell, most Americans who see themselves as having a layman's command of basic economic principles tend to be free market fundamentalists, which I see as simply being a function of how most of the pundit class tends to see economics. Consequently, discussions about the topic with such people tend to die pretty quickly when one starts talking outside this box of conventional wisdom--when you take a contrary point of view in such discussions, your opponents pretty automatically decide that you don't know what you're talking about.

This is a crying shame because the study of economics is waaay more sophisticated than the national conversation appears to understand. There are even some damned good criticisms of economics itself, from outside the field, but unless you accept the standard (often unproven) assumptions about how money and finance function, your opinion is D.O.A., and people just stop listening to you.

Case in point: this latest round of studies about single-payer. Even though it totally defies the free market fundamentalist version of the way the world works, there's just no real world information that truly refutes that single-payer is about twice as good as the inefficient, Frankenstein-like, insurance-driven system we have now. Actually, if you read the NYT article, it's not so difficult to understand why that's the case, but the "smart" Americans just can't seem to abandon their cherished, but flawed, knowledge of economic principles.

I have no idea what to do about this except, for now, to blame our authoritarian-driven public school system, which is far more concerned with instilling obedience into students than training them to criticize authoritative opinions.

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