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Andrew Sullivan has made some fairly ridiculous statements about "socialized medicine" over the years, and although his most recent ones aren't particularly better or worse than ones in the past, I had planned on writing a response. But then Kevin Drum beat me to it, so now I don't have to!

UPDATE: Wait. This latest post does deserve a response.

First Andrew says this:

I see no problem with the wealthy having access to better care than the less wealthy.

His readers apparently weren't happy with this idea, prompting this response:

It seems to me that this is equivalent to saying: I see no problem with living in a free society. Even if Michael Moore achieved his dream of corralling us all into a British-style healthcare system, private medicine would still endure in America. In fact, you'd have to make it illegal to prevent the wealthy having access to better care, newer drugs, faster service, better doctors. I know some leftists would gladly prevent the successful from getting better healthcare, but it won't happen in a free country.

So the choice we have is simply whether it's better for the government to provide a basic safety net and let the private sector do the rest, or whether government should manage almost the entire healthcare sector as a public good and let the wealthy opt out if they wish. Either way, the wealthy get a better deal.

Because I know that Andrew is a smart man, I have to assume he is being deliberately obtuse here. OK, sure, maybe his readers really were writing to suggest that everyone be forced by law to receive identical health care services, but I doubt it. More likely, they were responding to Andrew's claims that systems that ration care by wealth and income do a better job than those that are publicly controlled.

Andrew may have plenty of ideological reasons for believing that. The problem, however, is that out here in the real world, we have evidence that shows such claims are false. We spend far more than any other nation on earth for our health care, and yet we often end up with results that are far worse. Don't believe me? Go. Read. Ezra will explain everything.