Hey jaanquidam, have you seen this?

[electricland]

The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It, New York Review of Books

Haven't read it all yet, but it looks interesting. (And hey, Paul Krugman again!)

Comments

[lietya.livejournal.com]

That article is absolutely fascinating, and thank you for posting it. I haven't seen such a clear summation of the entire issue and attendant problems in one place before.

I'm also adding those books to my reading list; they all sound interesting.

[jaanquidam.livejournal.com]

I didn't see it--thank you! Although my first thought on seeing what was reviewed was: oh god. Because--and I'm not sure how familiar you are with our (U.S.) intrepid march toward fascism, so forgive me if this is all old news to you--the American Enterprise Institute isn't really a legitimate think-tank. It was created, as were Cato and Heritage, by Republicans who were fed up with academia because empirical evidence never supported their hypotheses. They're well-funded and consistently wrong, but the media being what it is, with its obsession with showing "both sides," they get attention because they've staked out the far right of intellectual discourse. Unfortunately, the media isn't as loyal to the far left, so AEI often gets paired up with Brookings--the pro-war think tank who apparently was too busy writing position papers to read the front page of the Washington Post, which proclaimed Iraq had no WMD--as representative of the whole left-right spectrum. At least there are some real academics in this review.

Then again, I could be all wrong, and maybe the Brookings and AEI folks did some honest work. For a change. Actually, Henry Aaron was at Maryland when I started as a grad student there--he's got a good reputation.

Okay, well, there I go again with the ranting and the spamming. Sorry about that.