David Frum Quotes
If you want to do spending austerity, single payer [for health insurance] is a powerful tool.
A single payer system for health insurance saves an enormous amount of money—15 to 20 percent of all health payments made under all health insurance. However, this quotation from a leading Republican disclosed a split in the Republican Party. Many really would like the many billions of dollars that would be saved every year by having one organization pay all health insurance bills as Medicare did, but the large insurance companies, major contributors to Republicans, of course did not want to compete for the single payer where most would lose their administrative overhead and profits from the existing inefficient system. So austerity, normally a strong Republican principle, gave way to the profits of an important Republican contributor base.
David Frum, Republican Presidential Speech Write, Canadian & American Political Columnist, Quoted in Josh Barro,, “Conservatives Fall in Love With Canada”, New York Times, September 21, 2014
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Unlike most forms of insurance virtually everyone will have one or more claims and collect in his or her lifetime. Many of use will never have an automobile crash and collect on our insurance policy, but health is different in that we all change health status from well to ill at times and if we are fortunate we return to a state of wellness. But as Eigen observes, most of us who are tell are only temporarily well, With time our state will change to ill and if we are not very fortunate we will never use our health insurance as we will be dead. There is almost no way to age in a modern society without needing health care or funeral services, That is the consequence of the normal process of aging. So with health insurance schemes we, in effect, pass money from the living well to the living ill. So if health care costs increase fastr than inflation, which it has almost always done in the last half century, the temporarily well will be paying more and more. The only way to break that cycle is to somehow limit the cost increases of health care to that of the inflationary increase. Eigen has argued that most of us focus on the wrong problem--the details of the way the well pay for the ill, when the only soltuion is to reduce the rate of increases of health care costs. And there are only 2 ways to do that: Reduce the compensation for all the health care actors--physicians, nurses, other staff, hospitals, and manufacturers of medical equipment, supplies and expecially pharmaceuticals which have been increasing at the fastest rate of all or wer privide more and more effective prevention.
The Republicans were trying to repeal the first national health reform since Medicare. But the part was split over what they would replace it with. Many wanted to give the health insurers more power and profits, but other Republicans like Cruz did not want to see the helath insurance premiums increase. Ironically, most members of Congress at the time agreed with Cruz's focus on lowering or at least holding health insurance premiums steady, but this was vert hard to do without heavily regulating the insurance companies or adding a public insurance program to compete with the insurance companies or eliminate the rights of the individual states to regualte and control; insurance in their state. And no majority could be found for any of these.
David Jeffrey Frum is a Canadian-American political commentator and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, who is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic as well as an MSNBC contributor. In 2003, Frum authored the first book about Bush's presidency written by a former member of the administration. He has taken credit for inspiring the phrase "axis of evil" in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address.
