President Obama inadvertently lurched into something like the truth at the Portsmouth townhall meeting, but still managed to miss the point of what he was saying. WaPo:

President Obama…said an audience member raised a “legitimate concern” about how a government-run health-care program might affect private insurers.

“My answer is that if the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining — meaning taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do — then I think private insurers should be able to compete. They do it all the time.”

Then he invoked the Postal Service: “I mean, if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It’s the post office that’s always having problems.”

The flaw in Obama’s argument is that he wants in healthcare to put price controls and detailed, intrusive microregulation on the equivalents of FedEx and UPS. FedEx’s success is a tribute to the power of deregulation, precisely the opposite of what Obama wants to inflict on the medical and insurance industries of the US.

Of course if you are aggressively pursuing, as Obama is, a single payer healthcare system while denying that is what you are doing, you are going to wind up in logical paradoxes all the time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 4:13 am and is filed under Democrats, General, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.