How dumb is George Will? He defeats his own argument over privatizing VA healthcare on Fox News Sunday and offers up a good reason for non-privatization. Thanks, George.
May 25, 2014

George Will may be the dumbest of the dumb when it comes to making vacuous points when trying to win an argument on TV. He went on a privatization jag on Fox News Sunday, equating the VA healthcare system to Obamacare and used Amtrak and the post office as reasons to privatize veteran's health care which are the Frank Luntz Republican talking points at the moment.

However, when he tried to respond to Kirsten Powers points that the free markets do not solve problems and used the airlines as her example of how bad the private sector works, he argued airlines can go out of business, so phooey. Huh? WFT?

Powers: Obamacare and the VA are not the same thing. Of course, the VA is government run healthcare...Obamacare is more like insurance...I also think the private sector has a lot of problems If you have a problem with Amtrak then I have a lot of problems with US Air and American and United, so this idea that putting things off into the private sector is going to make everything work also doesn't work if you consider your experiences I've had with insurance companies. This is not a surprising argument coming from Republicans.

Will: You can solve that Republican problem in the following way. Kirsten says, look Amtrak has trouble, so does U.S. Air. Now the difference is airlines, as a lot of them can tell you go out of business. Amtrak is run by a government that prints money and therefore can never let Amtrak go out of business.

How does that justify his argument? It doesn't. Will actually defeats his own argument because if VA healthcare goes out of business then what happens to the veterans who are receiving much needed medical care? Where do they get it from? How many months or years would it take for a new corporation to take over the business?

By keeping VA healthcare under the government's wing, it protects our veterans from ever losing their coverage even if the system has big problems. See, if you receive your Social Security and Medicare through the private sector and they screw up, your social safety nets go up in smoke. That's what would have happened during the global financial crisis and who would have suffered? Here's a hint, it won't be the wealthy. The elderly would have had their Social Security wiped out in one fell swoop with no way to recover their loses. I doubt vouchers or charities would have saved them from ruin.

Thanks George, I'll use this from now on to make my points.

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