Of wonks and men
Tuesday, October 20 2009
I am on record as being disappointed with HCAN’s insistence that health benefits remain untouched by taxation. Honestly, I find alienating their labor-centric focus, and I haven’t been nearly as active as I could be.
Now HCAN is running ads asking the Senate to get rid of the proposed excise tax on excess health benefits. These ads and their rhetoric are a bad idea, and I’m good company saying so. Ezra Klein wrote a trenchant critique last week, which you should read if this issue is important to you.
Richard Kirsch, the director of HCAN, then responded with a critique of Klein’s critique. I’m Ezra will respond on the merits of Kirsch’s case (which seem to me based on very misleading mathematics), so I won’t duplicate that effort.
I do want to point out Kirsch’s bottom line, which is that “Policy wonks need to think more like an average person.” Well, no – they don’t. The Orszags and Elmendorf’s of the world spend a lot of time, energy, and sometimes money learning to think like wonks. That’s why we need them, and that’s what we pay them to do. (And I’m talking honest-to-God wonks here, not the poseurs who make their living as pundits.)
To the average person, the health benefits exclusion looks like a great idea – but the average person doesn’t realize that their wages have been stagnant for years, because of the explosion in health costs. The average person doesn’t realize that meanwhile, those exploding costs are making it nearly impossible for those of us without employer-based insurance to get access to the care we need. And the average person doesn’t realize that one easy way to slow the growth of costs is to partially – just a little bit – close the valve on the exclusion.
A good wonk will help the average person see these things, and that’s exactly what Ezra has tried to do – Kirsch would say ‘unsuccessfully’, but decide for yourself. In the meantime, don’t believe everything you see on TV, even if it is an HCAN ad.
