Howard Dean: Ted Cruz doesn’t know anything about health care

Ted Cruz is alternately a radical right wing scourge that terrifies Democrats everywhere, or he's completely irrelevant. It all depends on which leftist loon you ask, and whether they've had their three martini lunch before you pose the question. Yesterday, Howard Dean appeared on CNN and seemed to think that A: Ted Cruz is relevant, and B: The thought of “President Ted Cruz” is terrifying for the citizens of Vermont.

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"Ted Cruz may be a very good politician but he certainly doesn't know anything about health care," Dean said. "I don’t want the Texas insurance commissioner being the commissioner up here in Vermont. So these are crazy idears that are from the far right. He’s a slick spokesman and God help us if he ever does get to be anything more than the senator from Texas.”

Dean was targeting (and mischaracterizing) Cruz's belief that the nation should allow people to shop for insurance across state lines. It's a move that would introduce genuine competition to the marketplace, as opposed to the phony competition promised by the Obamacare exchanges. Since lefties like Dean fear genuine capitalism like it's a rat with the plague, the concept of a truly open insurance market has long terrified them.

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Obviously, Dean's a big supporter of Obamacare. It's clearly the way to go. Cruz is probably just some nut who wants to undermine the Affordable Healthcare Act because he has "crazy right wing idears" about rationing care. Why, he probably thinks that Obamacare will fail to control costs because the IPAB is doomed to failure! Want to know who else thinks crazy stuff like that? ...Howard Dean. ...In July ...Of this year.

One major problem is the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them. There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting—the essential mechanism of the IPAB—has a 40-year track record of failure. What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has indicated that the IPAB, in its current form, won't save a single dime before 2021. As everyone in Washington knows, but less frequently admits, CBO projections of any kind—past five years or so—are really just speculation. I believe the IPAB will never control costs based on the long record of previous attempts in many of the states, including my own state of Vermont.

So, according to Dean, Cruz may not know much about health care. But, apparently, neither does Obama.

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