Commonwealth Likes NCPA Vignettes, Almost
In our Handbook on State Health Reform, we created vignettes to show how much better life would be in a reformed health care system. The Commonwealth Fund liked our idea so much they copied it for Karen Davis' Message in the latest CWF Annual Report. (Minus my writing panache and witty sense of humor, of course.)
The big difference: In the CWF vignettes there are no economic incentives, no patient power, no doctor power, no markets, no entrepreneurs and certainly no capitalists. In Karen's world, supervised by benevolent government bureaucrats who always make the right decisions, good things just happen to good people. Why didn't I think of that?
In 1993, the fictional couple, Harry and Louise, was used by conservatives to personalize the negative aspects of Hillary Clinton’s proposal to transform Americans system of health insurance. In that regard, the media campaign was successful in its efforts to raise awareness of the choices American consumers would likely give up in return for the (supposed) simplicity of a government-run system.
Now, Karen Davis, president of the left-leaning Commonwealth Fund, has created her own vignettes – fictional people who praise how universal coverage (somehow all paid for with other peoples’ money) has changed their lives for the better. Like most fairytales, everyone lives happily ever after. Also like most works of fiction, it seems devoid of the inconvenient details of how universal coverage could even work perfectly without appropriate incentives, without entrepreneurs and certainly without capitalists willing to invest in innovative treatments.
[See Karen Davis’ article here.]