This is what happens when people start believing their own bullshit.
Political scientist and commentator G. Terry Madonna also said he expects [Pennsylvania Governor Tom] Corbett to announce a plan to accept [Medicaid] expansion funds and use them to enable people to buy coverage on the private market rather than adding them to Medicaid, a government program.
He said he expects that path will enable Corbett to tap federal funds to cover uninsured Pennsylvania residents without needing approval from the Pennsylvania legislature, where Republican House members have resisted assorted Corbett proposals. [State Senator Pat] Vance also said Corbett doesn’t expect to need legislative approval.
Madonna noted that if Corbett uses federal funds to pay for private coverage, the coverage will likely provide less in terms of medical benefits. That’s because Medicaid has cost advantages such as lower payments for doctors and hospitals.
Presumably, the conservative critique of government-provided health care is that it takes money from productive people and gives it to unproductive people, and thereby allows unproductive people to be moochers their whole lives rather than pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. They also seem to think that private business is always more efficient than the government.
But Medicaid is more efficient than private insurance because it has enough scale to hold down costs, and its cheaper because it isn’t trying to make a profit or spending a lot of money on marketing. So, in this case, the governor is going to accept the Medicaid money (the redistribution of wealth) but he is going to make sure that the money doesn’t go as far as it should by giving all the money to health care profiteers. And he’s going to pretend that this corporate welfare isn’t government-provided health care.
How do we get rid of this political party?
