Dr. Gupta Self-destructs

Dr. Sanjay Gupta Trades His Reputation For A Chance To Bash Universal Healthcare:

To see this professional, with a heretofore gold-standard reputation among the TV watching public, unveil a tortured and irresponsible view of our country's healthcare system, is breathtaking and sad. There is too much at stake, and no time to spare, on politicized healthcare.

It's a fact: to deny healthcare is to kill. Gupta accepts the denying of healthcare.

"...what was most striking to me during the Moore-Gupta face-off on Larry King Live was when Gupta showed the heart of his bias, a bias against having our government guarantee universal health care.

Gupta says to Moore, 'You criticize the government so soundly. But you're willing to hand over one of our most precious commodities, our health care in this country, to the government.'

Moore rebutted, 'I actually love our government ... It does a great job of administrating Social Security ... the problem is who we've put in power who holds office.' "...

..."Michael, one of the best examples of health care, at least some sort of universal health care, would be Medicare. I think you would agree with that. It's going to go bankrupt by 2019. It's going to be $28 trillion in debt by 2075...would you say that this is going to be still a working system 20 years from now?

Is this some evidence that our government can't be directed to fix our broken health care system? Economist-blogger Dean Baker doesn't think so:

CNN's health care analyst is now telling people that Medicare is going bankrupt. What does this mean?Medicare's costs are projected to exceed its revenue and drain the surplus from its trust fund in a bit over a decade, but this has been true at several points in the past. Did Congress tell tens of millions of beneficiaries to get lost? No, Congress appropriated the money needed to keep the program going......If Dr. Gupta meant to imply that Medicare, as a government program is uniquely inefficient, then he is way off the mark. According to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (Table 13) per beneficiary costs have risen in nominal dollars by 519.5 percent since 1980. By contrast, the cost per enrollee of private insurance has risen by 676.6 percent over this same period.

That gets at the heart of Gupta's bias.

The pressures on Medicare's finances are not the fault of our government, but of skyrocketing health care costs across the board.

Yet Gupta's cherry-picks his facts to attack a government guarantee of universal care, and raise the prospect of dismantling Medicare, just like how conservatives sought to do the same with Social Security."