MOORE AND HMOS. Brian Beutler is right that Michael Moore's heaping of praise atop Hillarycare sort of -- oh, what's the word? -- shatters the argument that Moore is for undiluted single-payer. The Clinton plan was essentially a series of federally regulated and guaranteed HMOs, all of them privately administered. There was no new federal insurer at all. And yet Moore makes the plan's failure out to be a disaster, which, in fact, it was. The idea that Moore is some sort of single-payer absolutist is a bit off. This segment, by the way, wasn't particularly untruthful, but it was substantively off-base. Not to get too deep into the weeds of it here, but HillaryCare was an HMO scheme. Moore spends the next segment talking about how terrible HMOs are, as they denied occasionally necessary treatments to their members. HillaryCare would've done the same, in much the same way. It was, remember, going to be run by the same insurers, exercising considerable autonomy, operating under HMO rules. It would've been much better, if for no other reason than it would've ended the plight of the uninsured, but there still would've been problems. Not only that, but there will be those problems in a straight single-payer system, too. No matter how you slice it, this country can't afford utterly unlimited care. But when you start to make decisions about who gets what, people get angry, and mistakes are made. For that reason, we've found it easier to hide those decisions under the rubric of who can pay for what, which is a medically dumb method of rationing, but at least allows us to only screw those who lack the money to complain. --Ezra Klein
