Thursday, July 30, 2009

Obama in Karen Tumulty's excellent interview :

And I will say that this has been the most difficult test for me so far in public life, trying to describe in clear, simple terms how important it is that we reform this system. The case is so clear to me. And when I sit with our policy advisors — we had somebody here sitting right there this morning who is a medical expert, worked at McKinsey for a while, he's now working on our health care team — and he just ran through: We pay 77 percent more on prescription drugs, we're paying $6,000 more per individual on health care than any other industrialized nation; here's all the failures in the delivery system that account for it. It's not just because we are somehow more obese or more unhealthy. It turns out actually we're a little bit healthier than most of these other countries because our smoking rates are lower and we're younger. So we should actually be paying less than they are.

And when you just start hearing the litany of facts, what you say to yourself is this shouldn't be such a hard case to make, because the American consumer is really not getting a good deal.  

Sounds like a man in a bubble to me, listening to McKinsey guys tell him how right he is. ... P.S.:  Should we expect smoking to push up health care costs? Isn't lung cancer a relatively cheap way to die? ... [ via Treatment ] 11:52 A.M.

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Too Bad the '60s Didn't Take! E.J. Dionne, right on about "teachable moments," probably the most nauseating concept in modern politics. ... 11:51 A.M.

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Dude's on my turf . ... 11:50 A.M.

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