Lil White Lies: Dodging Magic Bullets

It’s been a while since I’ve taken a look at my conservative blogging counterpart’s Bashing Blumner series: he’s only done a few posts on her, because PolitiFact has been keeping him pretty busy. This recent post takes the St. Petersburg Times columnist to task for her seemingly poor reasoning with regard to the high costs of health care. And he may be right: but she has a very good point too.

In a column dated March 4, Robyn Blumner derided the Republicans' favorite method of reducing the high cost of health care, to wit, “tort reform is the magic bullet to cost containment…” Bryan White responds to that with “Blumner apparently thought it unnecessary to provide any example of the type of advocacy with which she charges Republicans.”

So, I’ll do Blumner a favor: straight from GOP.gov are here described  the first three “steps” of their “approach to health care reform” in a PDF document entitled “The Reform America can Afford Act (H.R. 5424)”:

1.  Lowering health care premiums 20% with no other explanation -- so I guess through all these steps, lowering premiums would be the “result” of their "magic bullet" reform.

2.  Reforming high risk pools – to make insurance available to those with pre-existing conditions, which if anything would increase costs because those who would be making claims and therefore would cost the insurers more would now by theory be able to get insurance, so this is more of a give-away……

3.  Ending “junk lawsuits” through “enacting medical liability reforms”--- which is another way of saying TORT REFORM….

So, PolitiFact might give Blumner a Mostly True or Half True on that one, but it’s still true that tort reform is quite high—let’s say Number Two--on the Republican List of health care reforms.

The heart of Blumner’s article, however, is this, which Bryan terms “magical thinking”:

Lil White Lies: No Way CRA

My "blog nemesis" Bryan White seems to revel in criticism of his local newspaper columnist, Robyn Blumner, whose credentials include having been a director for the ACLU.…Well there ya go!

At his blog there’s a *Topic of Note* section devoted to “Bashing Blumner” which includes his numerous write ups. One recently piqued my interest.

As stated by Bryan in his write up, the essence of this particular column by Blumner was that she… “perhaps once again inspired by a book from a liberal author, attempts to explain why Republicans are wrong to pin the financial crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act [CRA].” The liberal author Blumner drew from was financial expert and author of book Bailout Nation Barry Ritholtz, which  explains why the CRA was not to blame. The basis of Bryan’s contention of Blumner “buying” Ritholtz’s faulty reasoning was a critique by John Carney of Business Insider. This is the John Carney who wrote this article at the website American Conservative where he stated “We’re the backbench of a minority.”