Krugman: right wing comparisons of Obamacare with Switzerland's health care system

Swiss Myths

Oh, my. Aaron Carroll is rightly very, very annoyed at Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Arik Roy for saying that Obamacare should be replaced with a free-market system, like Switzerland’s. As he points out, the Swiss system is nothing like their description. In particular, they denounce community rating — but Switzerland has community rating!

Actually, though, it’s even worse than Carroll lets on, for two reasons.

One is that Obamacare in fact looks a lot like, you guessed it, the Swiss system — so much so that back in 2009 I described it as a plan to Swissfy America. After all the screaming about the awfulness of Obamacare, it’s pretty rich to hold up as a role model a very similar system.

But wait, there’s more: the Swiss system is more privatized than other European systems — and guess what, it has higher costs, indeed second only to America’s:



http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/swiss-myths/

Always great when Krugman can use the right's own words against them.