Healthcare
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The Healthcare Technocracy & the Pandemic
So, without realizing what has happened, the physician in the last two centuries has gradually relinquished his unsatisfactory attachment to subjective evidence—what the patient says—only to substitute a devotion to technological evidence—what the machine says. He has thus exchanged one partial view of disease for another. As the physician makes greater use of the technology
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Mike Konczal on the History of the Welfare State
My argument in my overly long piece posted over the weekend is similar to the one Konczal is making here in this important, informative essay in The Atlantic. His point is that the development of the welfare state during the Progressive and New Deal eras was organic–that it was not the work of social engineers, but
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Crashing the Frame
I've thought a lot over the years about persuasion and why it's so difficult, especially when it comes to political values and opinions, and the best conceptual tool that helps me to understand the difficulty is 'frames'. There are individual and group mindframes, and more often than not you can predict the individual's thinking if
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The ACA and the Technocratic Mentality (Updated)
I know that there are millions of Americans who are content with their health care coverage – they like their plan and they value their relationship with their doctor. And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to
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Quote of the Day: Michael Lind
Commenting on the Konczal post I referred to yesterday: Unlike conservatives, who are right-wingers first and Republicans second, all too many progressives put loyalty to the Democratic Party — most of whose politicians, including Obama, are not economic progressives — above fidelity to a consistent progressive economic philosophy. These partisan Democratic spinmeisters are now treating
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Quote of the Day: Mike Konczal
Talking about the ACA rollout: Some of the more cartoony conservatives argue that this is a failure of liberalism because it is a failure of government planning, evidently confusing the concept of economic “central planning” with “the government makes a plan to do something.” However, the smarter conservatives who are thinking several moves ahead (e.g. Ross Douthat) understand
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Krauthammer on The Daily Show
I don't know what happened to Charles Krauthammer. I read him in The New Republic back in the 80s, and he was a run of the mill foreign policy realist. And then The New Republic went all neoconservative and crazy pro-Israel, and I stopped reading The New Republic, and the next thing I know Krauthammer is
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The Obamacare Mess
So why is it that the technology available to Mr. Obama as president doesn’t compare to the technology he used to win an election? Much of the problem has to do with the way the government buys things. The government has to follow a code called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is more than 1,800
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Rawls v. Nozick
I am by no means a Rawlsian, but I can find some common ground with those who claim to be. I cannot fathom the mind of the Nozickian when it claims as it does to be "moral", and this piece in the NYT Stone lays out why. Closing graf: Rejecting the Nozickian worldview requires us