Giuliani on Health Care Reform

Good thing CNN got this 9/11 expert to weigh in on a very important and almost identical subject. See if you can follow his logic, which as far as I can tell is THE logic of the right. 40 million Americans are uninsured. About half those would have health insurance if only they could afford it. A government option would be affordable to these people. Therefore, a government option is off the table since too many people would want it because it would be so cheap. Makes sense to me!

Just to weigh in on the other talk of the day — the Jindal thing — it is always weird that Bob pulls out the FEMA card when illustrating government incompetence. I don’t think Katrina was such a disaster because FEMA is a horribly run agency. I think Katrina was such a disaster because FEMA was being run by an incompetent unqualified Bush crony. That’s a failure of leadership, not of government. The list of all the great things that government does quite efficiently, that BJ could have also drawn from if he felt like being straightforward, is a long one, but two that I think are the most important and get very little play in this debate are the school system and the post office — two institutions that exist in a public/private world.

I realize that schools function largely on the state level, but still, in almost every town, in almost every city, at every level of education, there are public and private options. I went to public high school, I have friends who went to private. Public schools haven’t put private schools out of business — AND (K-12) THEY’RE FREE. If you can afford private, go for it. But school, just like health care, should be available to everyone. As far as I’m concerned, health and education are not privileges; they are rights.

Not at all similarly, but still a private/public thing, is the USPS vs. UPS vs. FedEx vs. whatever else. Notice how they’re all still in business?!?!