the July 9 Times begins, sadly, …..”.Bret Stephens...starts off promisingly…...He cites…... Kenneth Arrow about how insurance discourages people from shopping around”

Why “Sadly” ?

Because this  demonstrates that  Stephens - the relatively  new  Times opeder  recruit, presumably intended   to bolster its insufficiently conservative bull pen-  got away with a shoddy journalistic trick.   

Which I explained  in truly breathtaking detail  5 days ago in a post labelled The Second Worst Failure (hereafter  TSWF) which is now slumbering peacefully to the left. Essentially, by Stephens quoting an Arrow  sentence out of context , he reversed its meaning. Acting- Like Humpty Dumpty-  as if Arrow’s words meant only what he, Stephens,wanted them to,

And got away with it .Except for the 3 and a half Dagblog readers who blundered into TSWF

A basic conservative position of course is that problems fix themselves in this  Best of all   Possible (oops delete that ). If you have a cancer, not-to- worry just chase around to enough  oncologists and you’ ll find one who’ll cure you for the money you have  available.

Stephens’ intellectually disrespectable attempt to claim the eminent Arrow was a  supporter of this nonsense  is described*  in TSWF. He wasn’t.  Let’s move on.

Stephens, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and their merry men want us to believe long enough for a 45 minute roll call that before Obamacare every disease was treated and the only things from which  people died  were planes crashing into the World Trade Center. And boredom.

Discussing Health Care with a conservative ,if you remind her- or more often him- of a mutual friend who died from ,say, Parkinsons he’ll briefly look sad ( and probably actually feel so ) and then brighten up and mumble something about “market distortions ” .And Hillary.

Health Care doesn’t drift like Manna from Heaven anymore than do Financial Crises cure themselves. 2008 didn’t cure itself.  Obama cured it  in the first 90 days of 2009. .

And the various diseases and other Health disasters the flesh is prone to  also don’t cure themselves so Obama set out to do something about them during the remaining 21 months before the Lords of Misrule  took control  and nonsense resumed.

*edited

. .