Blogging over at The Washington Monthly, Ezekiel Emanuel has penned one of the most woefully unconvincing critiques of single payer health care I have ever read. In two posts, (one, two), he raises these objections:
• "Americans are simply never going to endorse a Canadian style single payer system."
• "There are also large differences beteween the USA and Canada — like 10 times the population. Another is that they are much more egalitarian than Americans are."
• "Finally Canadians believe in good government, Americans are suspicious of government. The Canadian system is not one single payer, but one for each province run by provincal governments. Do you trust individual states to be able to run a health care system for their citizens? Seen what happened to Medicaid when we tried that in the USA — do you want to repeat that?"
• Big programs only come out of Depression, catastrophe, or presidential assassination.
