Remember the 2005 Social Security debate? George W. Bush had just been returned to office; his campaign was focused on national security and social issues — as I like to say, he ran as America’s defender against gay married terrorists — but as soon as the returns were in, he declared that he had a mandate to … privatize Social Security.
During the war of ideas that followed, conservatives repeatedly pointed to the example of Chile, with its privatized retirement scheme, as a shining role model for America to follow. Nonetheless, American voters, it turned out, really really didn’t like the idea of meddling with Social Security, and the Bush campaign fizzled away into slow debacle.
And then a funny thing happened: it turned out that the Chileans didn’t like their system either; it was massively reformed in 2008:
The cornerstone of the new law sets up a basic universal pension as a supplement to the individual accounts system.
In other words, Chile moved its system a substantial way towards being like, um, Social Security.
In the health reform debate, Singapore has played much the same role for conservatives that Chile played on Social Security — once again it was a small, far away country of which we know nothing, which supposedly had a wonderful health system based on free market principles. As Aaron Carroll has been pointing out , Singapore’s actual system is much less free-market, and involves much more government intervention, than legend has it. In any case, however, guess what: it turns out that Singapore isn’t happy with the system, and has just reformed it in a way that makes it much more like … Obamacare.
During the war of ideas that followed, conservatives repeatedly pointed to the example of Chile, with its privatized retirement scheme, as a shining role model for America to follow. Nonetheless, American voters, it turned out, really really didn’t like the idea of meddling with Social Security, and the Bush campaign fizzled away into slow debacle.
And then a funny thing happened: it turned out that the Chileans didn’t like their system either; it was massively reformed in 2008:
The cornerstone of the new law sets up a basic universal pension as a supplement to the individual accounts system.
In other words, Chile moved its system a substantial way towards being like, um, Social Security.
In the health reform debate, Singapore has played much the same role for conservatives that Chile played on Social Security — once again it was a small, far away country of which we know nothing, which supposedly had a wonderful health system based on free market principles. As Aaron Carroll has been pointing out , Singapore’s actual system is much less free-market, and involves much more government intervention, than legend has it. In any case, however, guess what: it turns out that Singapore isn’t happy with the system, and has just reformed it in a way that makes it much more like … Obamacare.
