David Brooks complains about politics of expanding health insurance for children in the US --
a smoke screen of obfuscation between who pays and who chooses. States have an incentive to ramp up benefits because they know that most of the cost will be borne by taxpayers somewhere else ... a fund-raising mechanism cowardly in the extreme. Politicians in Washington like to talk in the abstract about shared sacrifice. They could go to the American people and say: We need to insure more children and to do that we’re going to raise broad-based taxes slightly ... But that’s honest and direct, and therefore impermissible. Instead, this program is funded by raising taxes on smokers, who generally are much poorer than average Americans and much less educated.
Which is an argument for having a healthcare system with one entity doing all the choosing and paying all the bills from general tax revenues and not any specific taxation. A "national health service", if you will.
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