July 30, 2007

Well, isn't that convenient? It allows Professor Krugman to abuse and distort the arguments of his intellectual opponents without ever actually confronting them.

In today's column, "An Immoral Philosophy", Krugman argues that what motivates the President to oppose a massive expansion of the State Children's Insurance Program (SCHIP), is that the President, and by extension anyone who opposes SCHIP expansion, just doesn't want the government to do anything "good":

And here you have the core of Mr. Bush's philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution...So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can.

Does Krugman not know - or not care - about the phenomon of government insurance "crowd out", widely documented by the GAO, CBO, and respected economists like Jonathan Gruber?

The genuine free market criticism of SCHIP is that it has mutated away from its original purpose as a targeted safety net for poor children. The CBO pointed out this year that the year the program started (1997) 60% of the children who enrolled had been previously covered by private insurance, and that for every 100 new enrollees between 25 and 50 are dropping private coverage.

Furthermore, the vast majority of the children who would be covered by the proposed expansions already have private health insurance. The SCHIP debate then is, at root, not about insurance, or compassion, but whether we should be shifting families and children from private insurance to public insurance as a new middle class entitlement.

Professor Krugman favors univesal, government run health care, so he likes this idea. But it has nothing to do with morality. It is an arugment about means (what is the best way to insure the uninsured?), not ends (conservatives do, in fact, support a safety net for poor, uninsured children).

Krugman says to his readers that his charges against conservatives "sounds like a caricature". That is because it is a caricature, a shrill parody that uses strung together quotes meant to inflate his views beyond debate or criticism.

Posted by Paul Howard at July 30, 2007 02:20 PM

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