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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (11909)	11/26/2009 10:07:42 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Then we can have YOUR confirmation bias... in case you don't think you have one. Hmmmm. Peter confirmed his bias that the allegedly conservative columnist Brooks (and anybody else who writes for the major newspapers) is a flaming liberal who like all liberal morons favors the reform proposal, which would destroy us. You confirmed your bias that Brooks saw us moving us toward the European model, which is all right and good and noble, and coming out OK economically. Each of you seemed to have read right past the following: "Instead of reducing costs, the bills in Congress would probably raise them. They would mean that more of the nation’s wealth would be siphoned off from productive uses and shifted into a still wasteful health care system." "But the general view among independent health care economists is that these changes will not fundamentally bend the cost curve. The system after reform will look as it does today, only bigger and more expensive." "After all, if the current Congress, with pride of authorship, couldn’t reduce costs, why should we expect that future Congresses will?" My potential biases? Well, 1) I'm opposed to the reform proposal. 2) I have come to expect mindlessness, blatant bias, and hyperbolic rants in most of what I read on this topic. And 3) I have had exposure to Brooks in the past and found him, on the whole, an apt analyst and circumspect writer. So, confirmation bias would have predisposed me to find his piece anti-reform but that didn't happen. Nor did the piece confirm the expected mindless rant. OTOH, I have come to expect better of Brooks so that might have been a mitigating factor. The bottom line is that I confirmed my Brooks bias but responded counter to the two other potential confirmation biases. I think I got a lot closer to objective than you guys.