Source: NewsBusters (blog) (Original Article)
For the second week in a row George Will gave a much-needed education to one of the media’s most beloved liberal economists.
During the Roundtable segment of Sunday’s "This Week," Berkeley professor Robert Reich falsely claimed health insurance companies are exhibiting huge profits: "That is money directly out of the pockets of Americans."
Will countered, "[C]onfiscate all the profits of all the health insurance companies, with those profits you could finance our healthcare for 48 hours."
Reich arrogantly responded, "[R]ecipients of health insurance don’t know what they are buying very often. Until there are common standards, minimal standards, then people are going to be taken."
This nicely set Will up to drive the ball out of the park, "There you have the premise of this legislation and the core of today’s liberalism: the American people are such dopes they can’t be counted upon to buy their own insurance" (video embedded below the fold with transcript):Â
For the record, as NewsBusters has previously reported, health insurance companies are amongst the least profitable of all America’s industries. Here are 2008’s rankings done by Fortune magazine:
So, in 2008, health insurers ranked 35th in profitability returning a meager 2.2 percent on revenues. What this means is that for every dollar health insurers brought in, they made 2.2 cents.
Sadly, for liberal media members like Reich, that’s considered TOO MUCH! Nice job of Will to point out his inanity.
Of course, he’ll probably be the next liberal economist in the media to win a Nobel Prize.
But for now, Reich was just the second media darling in eight days to go head to head with Will and lose.
For those that have forgotten, George smacked around New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on last Sunday’s "This AMERICAN DRAGON dvd Week."
Who’s next?
—Noel Sheppard is the Associate …continue reading
