What Has Health Care Reform Ever Done For Us? To My Liberal "Bill Killer" Friends: Krugman (with the aid of Monte Python) Sums It Up.

In his Op Ed piece in today's New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist and Princeton  professor of Economics and International Affairs  Paul Krugman notes that many people who've "made careers by righteously demanding entitlement reform" are "running away now that the real thing has made an appearance."  Krugman states:

Health care reform does nothing, they cry — except for covering 30 million people, ending overpayment on Medicare advantage, making the first real attempt to use medical evidence to guide health care spending, starting up a wide range of pilot projects on cost control while empowering an expert panel to put the results of those projects into effect, providing financial incentives to limit excess coverage, and so on (emphasis mine).
But aside from that, you see, it doesn’t do anything.

Krugman then goes on to wryly note:

And my thoughts turn, as they so often do, to Monty Python:

All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?

 

Right on, Professor Krugman.