The Return of the Chart

Jonathan Cohn says what needs to be said about the House Republicans’ new chart mocking the House Democrat-sponsored health care bill:

But these charts — and, more important, the Republicans who use them as propoganda [sic] — tend to ignore one inconvenient fact: American health care is already complex. Ridiculously complex. Thanks to decades of haphazard, disorganized growth, it’s evolved into a mind-numbing web of institutions, agencies, businesses, and individual actors. And while that may be self-evident to anybody who’s ever had to deal with, say, a billing dispute between an insurer and hospital, it’s easy to lose sight of that when the discussion is all about what reform might do — rather than what health care would be like without it.

One reason that the chart, which echoes the Republican “look how complicated this is” charts that attacked health care reform in 1993 and cap-and-trade earlier this year, is more of a throwback than a political weapon.

Chart after the jump:

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