America’s Superiority Complex

Paul Krugman's blog
NYT

Aaron Carroll has a very good takedown of an op-ed article by Senator Ron Johnson, who basically exploits his infant daughter’s medical experience to make an incoherent attack on the Affordable Care Act. His daughter received excellent treatment, and he asserts that she wouldn’t have received that kind of treatment under universal health insurance, because …. well, he doesn’t explain.

Along the way he commits some of the classic howlers, like the one about how you can see how bad single-payer insurance is by the fact that Americans don’t have to wait as long as Canadians for hip replacements, which in Canada are paid for by the government, while in America they’re mainly paid for by … Medicare.

But what struck me about the whole piece was the assumption that modern medicine in general is something only we lucky free-market Americans have, while in Europe they’re still using leeches or something. In other words, it’s part of the superiority complex you often encounter in U.S. politics; people just know that we’re the best, and won’t believe you when you tell them that actually they have the Internet, cell phones, and antibiotics in Europe too.

(More here.)