Yglesias tackles student lonas and Medicare Advantage:

The interesting thing here is not just the particulars of the policy, but the bizarre view of the role of government that Howard is espousing. Rather than a debate between progressives who want the government to provide a public service and conservatives who want the service to exist just insofar as it can be supported by the private market, we have a debate where both sides agree that the service ought to exist but the right thinks it’s important that it be done in a less efficient more costly manner because doing it that way generates profits for people who in turn give them money in some kind of nutty sense is supposed to preserve the integrity of the private sector. And it’s not just on student loans. You have essentially the same debate over Medicare Advantage between Democrats who want the government to provide seniors with costly medical services and Republicans who want Democrats to provide seniors with an even more costly version of those services by bringing private insurance companies in as middlemen. It’s ludicrous. Now elected officials are going to get mixed up in these kind of scams now and again, much as you see some Democrats siding with campaign contributors in the hedge fund industry over the basics of progressive politics. But when Chuck Schumer pulls that kind of stunt he takes crap about it from liberals while conservatives seem too busy whipping themselves into frenzies over fake pork-barrel schemes to send mice on maglevs to Disneyland to notice what’s happening.

Tags: GOP, student loans

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Some Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.