Billings Blog

Aaron Flint is slowly beginning to grow on me. He isn’t as articulate or amiable as Dave Rye, but he focuses more on issues, which means there isn’t as much of the usual yak from the usual callers. But Flint said two things this week that sounded outright wrong to me, and another that is dubious.

First, he quoted with apparent approval a friend recently graduated from medical school who compared covering pre-existing medical conditions to allowing uninsured motorists to buy car insurance after they have a wreck. The usual disclaimer goes here: I listen to talk radio while delivering newspapers, so I’m bouncing in and out of the car and never giving the radio my undivided attention. Maybe he didn’t mean what it sounded like he meant. But it sounded just crazy. The point of healthcare reform isn’t to let people buy insurance after they get sick. It’s to get insurance for everybody so that they are covered if they do get sick or laid off. If this is the kind of thinking we’re getting from newly minted doctors, then none of us had better get sick.

Second, he had a caller who said that the trouble with Americans is that they want a Cadillac healthcare system at Chevrolet prices. Flint liked this so much he repeated it after a break. But America has the most expensive health care in the world. No other country is even close. If any country pays for Cadillac health care, this one does. Most other countries have decided to pay Volvo prices, and everybody gets more or less a Volvo. Here, some people get the Cadillac. Most of us get the Chevrolet, and quite a few of us get a ‘63 DeSoto with bald tires. Again, the goal of healthcare reform is get those DeSotos off the road — and maybe roll back those Cadillac prices a bit.

Finally, Flint expressed at least a couple of times his concern that Obama has set a date for beginning to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. It’s a legitimate concern, but it occurred to me back during the similar debate over Iraq that there are advantages to setting a date. I’m glad to hear that people in the administration are starting to push back on this point a bit.

Obviously, any date that’s set has to have some wiggle room in it, and this one apparently does. But it also sends a signal to the Afghani government that it had better get its act together. Critics ask, won’t the Taliban and Al Qaida just lay low until we leave?

Let’s hope so.  Everybody knows that an idle army deteriorates. It’s tough enough to keep a professional army intact when it has nothing to do, especially if it is far from home. Morale declines; discipline erodes; alertness lags. And that’s for armies whose soldiers are getting three squares and a cot, plus a regular paycheck. Imagine how much harder it is to keep intact an insurgent force that is held together by nothing more than the fanatical devotion of its adherents.

Or think of it this way: Suppose that Al Qaida were to consciously adopt a unilateral 18-month cease fire. It calls off attacks. It sends its soldiers home or to whatever rathole will conceal them. In the meantime, it allows NATO forces to reinforce at will, train Afghani troops without disturbance, work on building infrastructure and a solid government, and continue to seek out and destroy Al Qaida operatives and hideouts wherever they can be found.

What would we think of that strategy? We would love it. It would be sheer suicide for Al Qaida. So why does it strike fear in the hearts of conservatives?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under David Crisp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.