Steyn flu

With the Republican party in disarray, the right-wing media have enthusiastically taken up the task of opposing President Obama at every turn. None is more eloquent than Mark Steyn who, although he lives in New Hampshire, is surely The Most Right-wing Canadian in the World. Steyn's big issue of the moment is health care reform, which he sees as the death knell of all that's good about America.

His latest polemic on the subject is well worth reading, but only because Steyn is such a good writer. The content is a lot less commendable, a farrago of exaggeration and misrepresentation. Steyn is spectacularly (and maybe deliberately) missing the point of Obama's reforms. He notes that life expectancies are very similar not only in the US and "socialized" Europe, but even in countries such as Bosnia/Herzegovina. His take on this fact is that there would be no real health benefit for the US in moving toward a more European health care model. But surely the real question is this: if Bosnia achieves a life expectancy of 78 years while spending a small percentage of its small GDP on health care, what good does it do the US to spend 16% of its much higher GDP to achieve the exact same outcome?

The Obama health care package is partly about "fairness", which Steyn is certainly entitled to deride if he chooses. But if you read Obama's own words, it's much more about reducing America's enormous overspending on health care and freeing up resources for more productive uses. Considering the glaring need to restructure vast swathes of the US economy in the wake of the credit crunch, you'd think even the most died-in-the-wool Republican would see the virtue of that.