my notion on an inexplicably unperceived or un-imagined argument that supporter of single-payer healthcare ought to be using (or, presently, for the proposals involving a government-run insurance option) might be gaining some traction.
Several weeks ago, I submitted a question to Salon’s editors hoping they would consider putting it to their “wingnut” columnist (he or she is a former Bush official who takes questions from the ‘left’ and then gives a ‘right’ response). The editors chose that question and ‘wingnut’, with admitted trouble, took it up. His difficulty with it, and the paltry, shallow quality of his response validates my view that this line of argumentation would provide an effective tool to counter the rightwing narratives on socialized medicine.
This morning, Matt Yglesias at Think Progress makes the same point with the added bonus of a Canadian conservative senator defending Canada’s healthcare system from American rightwing smears. Read it here.
A fundamental premise of modern rightwing ideology is that consumers of services and products provide the purist and most efficient measure of the the relative quality of such goods or services. If people aren’t satisfied with a thing, they won’t continue to buy it or support it. Consequently, reatively lousy things will disappear from the marketplace and relatively positive things will continue to be purchased or supported. All of which, the ideology claims, obviates the need for arbitrary, inhibitive and inefficient government regulations.
That the consumers of socialized medicine in EVERY advanced western nation which has such a system (that is, the citizens of every advanced western nation other than the US) have utterly refused to support any party which might be foolish enough to make such a change part of their policy platforms argues (using this fundamental rightwing ideolocial underpinning) that the electoral marketplace universally finds satisfaction in socialized medicine once they have tried it.
