MITCH MCCONNELL was visibly distraught after the Republicans’ “skinny repeal” of Obamacare was defeated in the Senate, but he was not too out of sorts to get in a dig at Europe. The majority leader wondered acidly what ideas Democrats might have for fixing American health insurance, and noted that most Democratic senators had voted “present” on a bill proposing that America should embrace a single-payer system. “Apparently they didn’t want to make a decision about whether they were for or against socialised medicine. A government takeover of everything. European health care,” Mr McConnell said. These things, he implied, were all connected, and very bad.
Mr McConnell’s syllogism, equating single-payer health insurance systems with socialism, government and Europe, rests on a set of deep archetypes. It can trace its roots back more than a century, to the days when Gilded Age railroad barons fulminated against the leftist European immigrants who, they believed, were...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2uJXz8d
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