John Torinus gets clock cleaned in Healthy WI debate, claims victory

Hilarious.

In case you -- like most people -- missed last week's debate over Healthy Wisconsin between WMC board member and Journal Sentinel columnist John Torinus and superwonk Dave Riemer, it was a doozy.

It went something like this:

Torinus brings up anti-Healthy WI rhetoric. Riemer shoots it down.

Torinus trundles in some numbers to make his case against Healthy WI. Riemer points out that Torinus is looking at the wrong numbers.

Riemer asks Torinus once, then twice -- then the debate moderator has to follow up and ask -- for his alternative is to Healthy WI.

Torinus mumbles something about the power of the marketplace, etc., etc.

All in all, not a good day for John Torinus.

This is how Torinus recaps it in his Sunday Journal Sentinel column:

When I challenged David Riemer, the architect of the pending bill for a Wisconsin single-payer system for health care, that his concept was Swiss cheese, more holes than solutions, he challenged me for my plan.

Therein lies the problem.

Policy wonks like David - and he is one of the best and brightest - look for sweeping solutions. That usually means top-down, one-size-fits-all mandates, a bias toward big government and, inevitably, horribly higher taxes.

Save me from grand schemes....

My plan is marketplace. Turn it loose. Health care needs a discipline that only the market can provide.

Reading this, you'd think Torinus actually landed a rhetorical punch on Riemer. Unless the Brawler blinked and missed it, he didn't.

Torinus goes on to talk about the Nobel Peace Prize-winning work he's done on health care at Serigraph, strangely omitting one way he's recently contained health care costs: Cutting 3 percent of his work force.

Turn loose the marketplace indeed.

Hey Journal Sentinel: If you're going to give a weekly platform to a WMC flack, at least make sure he has the intellectual integrity to admit he's been beaten in an argument -- when he's not caught totally ill prepared -- rather than declare, bruised and bleeding, "You shoulda seen the other guy!"

UPDATE: In Effect, possibly the only other person in the state who tuned in to the Great Torinus Route, offers his own, more nuanced, take here.

Comments

[Hermes]

no, In Effect's not the only one. :)

[chuck b]

One needs to look a bit more closely at the single payer plan, which puts a huge part of the financing cost on tobacco users. I am not a smoker, but I think it's unfair to put such are large (40% increase per pack of cigarettes) part of the burden on one single sector. Why don't we put a $10 fee on all people who eat in restaurants, or people who walk to work or those who drive, or any nebulous group? Just because a person smokes, doesn't mean they are to blame for ALL health matters.