[Pollster1]

"We have a health system that, in terms of costs, is really out of control," he added. "And if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So we need something else."

I fundamentally disagree, not with the facts but with the Buffet interpretation. If we are going to have increased productivity, leading to increased individual income, where could it be spent better than on better medical care? Given a choice of more trinkets from China, more food from Arthur Daniels Midland, or better medical treatment to improve quality of life, I find that a no-brainer. I'd like to see 80% or 90% of increases in individual incomes go to improving our individual medical care.

As with so many crises, the facts are being twisted. We are spending sensibly, based on enlightened self-interest, as one would expect with individual decisions, but the liberals are pretending that our rational choices are a crisis as an excuse to grab a large chunk of the GNP that they can control and dole out to their connected donors. We certainly do need reform to remove the perverse incentives created by the previous government interventions in these same decisions, but we don't need socialized medical care, even if we could remove the death panels. We especially don't need the crony-capitalist train wreck called ObamaCare.

[cynwoody]

If we are going to have increased productivity, leading to increased individual income, where could it be spent better than on better medical care? Given a choice of more trinkets from China, more food from Arthur Daniels Midland, or better medical treatment to improve quality of life, I find that a no-brainer. I'd like to see 80% or 90% of increases in individual incomes go to improving our individual medical care.

No, Buffet got it right, even if he now wants to walk it back to protect the Democrat Party.

The purpose of an economy is to allocate resources productively. Our health care economy has been broken for decades. How can you make a rational choice about how much to spend on health care when there is no way to know how much it should cost? It's idiocy to allocate 80% or 90% of your incremental income to health care when it's mostly going to paper pushing and taxes. It needs to be replaced by a market system that wrings such inefficiencies out, so that our health care dollars go to provide actual health care.

The Democrat solution to the health care market's woes is always even more of what broke it in the first place. That's because the Democrats don't really want to fix it. They just want the power the system gives them. They want ObamaCare to be implemented and fail so that they can come back say, "See! It doesn't work! Now we need single payer!"