Framing or reframing the health care debate

No way will Ann Coulter be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, although the ever-confident blonde conservative of razorlike wit has suggested that her ongoing series of columns on "Liberal Lies About National Healthcare" deserves the nomination that it won't get. You might say she has the audacity of hope (hers makes more sense than you-know-who's). And why not?

Coulter can still serve up a bon mot as well as anyone else writing today. Certainly it's not always a mot juste or -- heavens to murgatroid -- a beau geste, but her verve is a thing to behold:

According to a 1997 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the homicide rate with firearms alone was 16 times higher in the U.S. than in 25 other industrialized countries combined.

That will tend to reduce the U.S.'s "life expectancy" numbers, while telling us absolutely nothing about the country's medical care. (I promise that if you make it to a hospital alive, you are more likely to survive a gunshot wound in the U.S. than any place else in the world.)

It's comparing apples and oranges to talk about life expectancy as if it tracks with a country's health care system. What matters is the survival rate from the same starting line, to wit, the same medical condition. Not surprisingly, in the apples-to-apples comparisons, the U.S. medical system crushes the welfare-state countries.

A little Coulter goes a long way, so when you want more measured arguments, it's best to follow the sage (ha!) advice of the Western Confucian, who points to an essay from Dr. Doug Iliff, M.D., on "The Ten Most Important Questions to Ask About Health Care in America."

Economics looms large in those questions, but it's not alone.

I should link the Western Confucian, Joshua Snyder, more than I do. He finds interesting things from his perch in Korea and has good taste in music. Then there's this, from the bio on his blog: "He [the self-described Western Confucian] sees Confucianism, condemned as "reactionary" during the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as a political philosophy that has many cognates with both American Paleoconservatism and Paleolibertarianism, in that its twin pillars, Li (Etiquette) and Jen (Benevolence), posit reverence of tradition, ritual, and antiquity on the one hand and governance by moral example rather than force on the other."