The Movie, if there is one, is "No Country for Old Republicans".

Can't stop what's coming.

So what did Shlaes think of secret wiretapping and monitoring books signed out from a library?

As for the health care system that Americans may envision, I'd look to Europe. Our system in Canada is a classic example of how to take a system that worked and screw it over through funding cuts and an ideological drive to privatize.

Perhaps I'm missing something (not unusual in itself) but isn't the emphasis on IT elements of health care reform supposed to address issues with data and systems incompatibility that require manual processing to resolve and are a large part of the reason that any large medical practice has staff simply to resolve insurance data entry and reconciliation?

I appreciate that Shlaes is professionally obligated to come up with a reaction that falls somewhere on the woe-to-hysteria continuum, but does a data dictionary or metadata or an XML schema really take us over to the Matrix? I'm sure this crack is out of date in terms of the bleeding edge of softwar thinking, but it sounds like she's confusing Neo with SOA.

Tortured metaphors notwithstanding, someone should point out that it was the Bush administration, not Obama's, that created the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, five years ago. So maybe they were the real Matrix?

"In the Obama Era, it seems, we all pick our way through anxious lives that have something to do with software."

If having lives that "have something to do with software" puts us in the matrix, why not Tron, or Weird Science, or Robocop. They're all equally irrelevant metaphors...

I've been managing my money online for the last eight years. If banks can handle data with a reasonable expectation of privacy, it's time for medicine to drop those quill pens and retrain the manuscript illumination monks to do data entry.

And while you're at it, can we get doctors to start using email? This alone would save a huge amount of staff time spent getting routine questions answered.

Schools for all, fire departments for all, and now a slight move in the direction of health care for all!? It's a sinister plot to give tax-paying Americans something good for their money with no corporate middle-men to jack up the price! You MANIACS! You're blowing it up! DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

@agore

If banks can handle data with a reasonable expectation of privacy

They can't.

Reading Bruce Schneier's blog at http://www.schneier.com/blog/ gives you lots of data on just how poor online privacy and security really are. Security Fix at the WaPo, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/ , is educational also.

I think Shlaes needs to watch The Matrix again. In Obama's administration, we scramble in the reality that we are really a group of desperate people in a bad situation, looking for a leader to keep us out of harm's way. Shlaes and whatever supporters he has must really want to go back to the false prosperity of the matrix, eating the fake steak and assuming everything is fine.

Sheesh.

from as completely incompetent an intellectual fraud as Amity Shlaes? Every respected historian of the New Deal has condemned her work as shallow, misleading, and ignorant. The only reason she gets any attention is that the Republican noise machine promotes her clock-cuckoo world-view for ideological reasons.

... would be delighted to lead anxious lives that had something to do with software, instead of leading anxious lives of unemployment and financial disaster.

As for the Republicans, they've never liked FDR and they're beating up on him as a proxy for Obama. If they can discredit his solutions, they'll pre-empt Obama from trying something similar. Unfortunately, enough folks who lived through the Depression and benefitted from FDR's programs have died off that these events are passing out of common memory. The Republicans can then distort them at will, particularly given our woeful state of knowledge of history.

were the answer to the depression.

i'll take the red pill please

the basic premise of "The Matrix" (that humans can be used as energy sources), is moronic from an energy-efficiency standpoint--the food used to feed all the humans contains far more energy than can be recovered as heat from people's bodies. Plus, if you cut out the humans, not only don't you have a hostile race to worry about, you also don't need to expend unnecessary energy running the Matrix 24/7.

(Of course, you ALSO don't have much of a movie.)

Going back to the point at hand:

Comparing government-run health care to the totalitarianism of the Matrix is absurd, given that we don't see uprisings against it in any of the numerous other industrialized nations that have such health care systems. Obviously, Shlaes views all government through this Matrix prism--to him, anything government-run inevitably leads to oppression. Too bad he's a hypocrite, given that he uses public roads, trusts that the food he buys is not poisonous or germ-laden, and expects that if his house should catch fire, his local fire department will put out the flames.

The Obama administration needs to take each one of the talking points of those opposing universal health and in validate them with facts.

I do fear however if the Obama adminstration is not willing to committ to a single payer heath insureance it will cost us more and not solve the problem. I would like to see a commitment to change Medcicare into the single payer health insurance for all citizens and legal residents. Other countries support their programs with a health premiums based on income, separate from income taxes. A Universal, single payer program is just one large group plan. Most of of pay health premiums in one way or another. Why not pay into one plan that would reduce all our premiums and give health care to everyone?

Where I live in Silicon valley there are no or few doctors in a private practice. Most doctors are now are connected to hospital, foundations, or group clinics. It is the private insurance companies who approve or disapprove of payments for services,not doctors, not patients. Every doctor and hospital has to be on an approved list, and special treatment must first be approved by the PRIVATE insurance company.

For instance my insurance, Blue Cross PPO, will only pay for 12 PT visits a year, and only to to thier approved PT, which I considered PT factories. Many people I know, myself included, chose to pay for the most qualified PT provider in our area, rather than go to those on the Blue Cross's approved list. Many very qualified PT services have been driven out of business by the insurance companies and, we are left with what I call PT factories.

So the whole argument that we will have less choices is bogus.

I am a very healthy person over 60, and more than once a year, my BC premiums get raised, and the services covered reduced. We are already limited in choices private insurance companies are willing to cover, so replacing private insurance with a single payer program will reduce our premiums and won't change the choices at all.