Wow, Just.... Wow

Is There Any More Point to Talking About Health Care?:

So we've arrived at an impasse. I think fiat will screw up the health care system even worse than fiat has already screwed up the health care system, and that this will be bad for everyone in the long run. I think that any program enacted now is likely to be the tipping point--once the government controls more than 50% of the health care system (it's over 45% now), it crowds out private health insurance for most people. I think that this is what the people behind the system want it to do, largely because that's what they keep saying they want.

First new and absolutely bugfuck insane premise: the problems with our health care system are due to Medicare and the VA preventing a pure free market state.

I think probably most people would agree that if Rand is right, and price controls shave, say, almost a year off of average lifespans, this is not necessarily a good deal for even the squishiest bleeding heart liberal--for the same reasons that socialism turned out not to be a good idea. No, I'm not calling you a socialist. I'm saying that if nationalizing companies and 90% tax rates on the very wealthy had worked well anywhere, a lot more liberals would be in favor of those things, because if you take away the unintended consequences that they turned out to have, they seem to conform to a lot of progressive priorities about justice, distribution, and so forth. But they didn't, and so most progressives have (or so I devoutly hope) abandoned these sorts of ideas in favor of a less intrusive agenda.

Hey, another huge fucking mistake. The Rand paper she's referring to, but not linking to, is about the hypothetical changes involved in changing the profits of the "biopharmeceutical" industry, NOT the insurance industry. So Megan is using a bait and switch just to begin with. I'm not qualified to challenge the Rand paper, but I am pretty fucking skeptical of the claim that reducing the profits of big pharma will cost us 8 months of life.
Second new and bugfuck premise; liberals are implicitly dishonest about our true goals for society. And neither should we infer any possible projection from this claim.
But back to killing ourselves via reduced profits;

So ultimately I'm saying, I think this is the way that our government works, and this is the way that markets work, and for all the screaming, these are not crazy positions. There's plenty of evidence for government crowding out. There's plenty of evidence for price controls. There's plenty of evidence for what happens to markets that are largely governed by price controls.
You may disagree. You think government works better than I do. You think we'll be able to draw a line in the sand and keep the government from crossing over it to take over more of the market. You think government spending can substitute for R&D, because you don't find the socialist calculation debate compelling. Or maybe you say, hey, yeah, well, 0.7 years off the average lifespan isn't a bad tradeoff for covering the uninsured.

On one side, Megan has this Rand paper. On the other side, we have Medicare, the VA, SCHIP, and the improved outcomes for far less cost evidenced by the nationalized health care systems of every other industrialized nation in the world, of which we're only trying to become more like the most conservatively nationalized systems. We're fools for arguing with her, but she'll humor us and let us try.
But her patience is running out;

So why talk any more? I can't believe how nasty this debate has gotten. I can't believe that people who claim to value a classically liberal market society, on the one hand, and people who say that all they want to do is help people, turn into such screaming, hate-filled lunatics when the subject comes up. A debate over health care should not remind me so much of a debate over the Iraq War. I write thousands of words on innovation, and John Holbo boils my concerns about lost years of life down to "indifference to the poor"--as if, first, the poor will not be helped by new treatments, and second, we should do anything at all, no matter how horrific the results, as long as it helps the poor. Well, and third, as if the poor weren't on Medicaid, but that's another rant. This is about as useful as my saying that John Holbo's basic philosophical premise is a desire for my grandchildren to die young. I devoutly hope that if any of his freshmen said anything remotely this silly in a paper, Mr. Holbo would flunk them.

It's all about her, first and foremost, and how she feels about being criticized by those who dare to mistakenly find flaw in her positions. She is a victim, and we should be thinking about her feelings instead of being upset by her placing a greater value on profits and blindly casting about for an excuse to justify it. After all, the Rand study she cites was released in December of last year, and it has formed the core of her argument since.
She spends the rest of the post in concern troll mode talking about how sad she is and equivocating unequal behaviors. Bringing a LOADED FIREARM to a peaceful public meeting is fine but silly, but those who "accuse" those Second Amendment crusaders of holding extreme beliefs based merely on them expressing extreme beliefs in videotaped and nationally broadcast interviews are uncivil, and so on. She can save that shit for the Passive Aggressive Olympics, I'm done for the night.