As part of the Universe's ongoing, darkly comic effort to bring to our attention the fact that we are stranded inside one, vast, "Naked Came The Manatee"-style joke novel being tossed back and forth, chapter after chapter, between the ghosts of Philip K. Dick and Hunter Thompson...no less than Paul Krugman has been enlisted to narrate the third-person omniscient epilogue to the section entitled "Richard Nixon: Filthy Commie Rat."
From the NYT:
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As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.
Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.
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Next up, a special, three-week Glenn Beck expose of the socialist interstate highway system entitled "Dwight Eisenhower: Secret Transexual Fascist Vampire" that will have the teabag patriots howling that Ike's picture must be taken off the four dollar bill immediately!
3 comments:
Martin Van Buren 2012!
Don't forget (and I cringe to think of Nixon as Progressive, in any sense of the word, but that shows how low we have come) The Clean Air Act, The Clean Water Act, and Equal Rights Ammendment (desegregation). I weep.
What got Nixon thinking about health care reform (as a conversation with Ehrlichman on the Nixon tapes revealed) were Ehrlichman's conversations with Edgar Kaiser, and how Kaiser Permanente wanted to use HMOs as a way to make money off of health care--once Nixon understood that those reforms meant profits to people who would contribute to GOP campaigns, it struck him as a good idea.
We forget, these days, that forty years ago, there was a reasonably sturdy county-level public health service in place, and it was only after those institutions were starved of funds and were sold off to for-profit chains that insurance became a more critical matter for many people, and HMOs took off--and the problems with insurers began to grow.
Nixon didn't want to have anything to do with health care reform until he realized that it was a way for capitalists to make money. Then he was all for it.
It's not unfair to say that all efforts at reform have been tainted ever since by that legacy.
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