Reason Magazine Defends Blunt's Original Medicaid/Medicare Comments, Doesn't Buy His Spin

There's an interesting perspective on Reason Magazine's "Hit & Run" blog regarding Roy Blunt's Thursday comments about Medicaid and Medicare. Blunt, you may recall. said "you could certainly argue that government should have never have gotten in the health care business," and specifically mentioned the creation of Medicaid and Medicare. Sensing a serious problem on their hands, the Blunt campaign tried to spin the comments away late yesterday, claiming he had been taken out of context (wrong) and that he was actually talking about "the current health care debate" (true, but only after the comments about creating Medicare and Medicaid).

Well, Peter Suderman of Reason (tagline: "Free Minds and Free Markets"), not only isn't interested in Blunt's spin -- he likes what he heard from the Congressman.

Suggesting that Medicare's potential problems outweigh its benefits — particularly given that the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid have made it exceedingly difficult to implement a true market-driven health-care system — might be politically ill-advised, but it doesn't actually seem all that crazy.

It's probably true that health-care reform geared toward providing universal coverage wouldn't "usher in the collapse of capitalism or a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare" for patients. But one needn't see a Roland Emmerich-style catastrophe on the horizon to worry about the potential for problems with a massive expansion of government involvement in health care, nor does one need to think of Medicare as an unmitigated disaster to think that perhaps it wasn't all that great an idea.

I disagree with Suderman, but appreciate that he's straightforward about what he thinks. 

The same can't be said for Blunt -- he dished red meat to a right-wing talk show audience, didn't like the response from people who might not normally listen to talk radio, and now wants people to not believe their own ears.