I don’t really have a dog in the health-care debate since I’m less than 1000 days away from the Medicare buffet.  But the politics of the debate have captured me and the media bias that it exposes is instructive.

The Obama administration and their friends in the media are denouncing the sometimes loud dissent that liberals are facing in town hall meetings on health care.  It’s worth looking back a few years to see how some of those same journalists celebrated anti-Bush dissenters and denounced what they claimed was the Republican administration’s attempts to stifle dissent.  In 2003, Keith Olbermann saluted the anti-Iraq war protests: “It is political dissent that created this country and sustained it and improved it,” while PBS’s Bill Moyers found it “galling” to see “all those moralistic ideologues in Washington…attacking dissenters as un-American.”  The above quotes came from the Media Research Center.

How would I “fix” health care.  I’d move in the direction proposed by John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods in an oped in the 8/12/09 WSJ, towards a more market driven system.  The federal government is an awfully large, very blunt instrument.  It cannot adjust easily to changes in technology, markets and costs.  The market on the other hand is ugly and unfair but it delivers goods and services better than government.