The Washington Post’s Trumpian Ideology Exposed

Most people stopped taking the Washington Post opinion section seriously since its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos decided to make it another prop for the Trump administration. But occasionally they even sink below their new low standards. They did so today with two editorials; one denouncing plans for universal Medicare in the U.S. by pointing to problems with the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom, and the other celebrating the backing off of auto mileage standards in the United States and Europe.

Starting with the one trashing the NHS, the Post complains that the UK spends a larger share of its GDP on healthcare than the OECD average but has worse outcomes. This claim is true but is worth some qualifications.

The country that spends by far the largest share of its GDP on healthcare is the United States. We spend 17.2% of GDP on healthcare by the OECD measure, compared to 11.1 percent in the UK. The difference is even more striking looking at spending per capita. The United States spent $12,650 per person last year, more than twice the UK’s $5,590 spending per person. And in terms of outcomes, life expectancy for people in the UK is almost three years longer than in the United States, despite the much higher level of spending here.

The Post’s comparisons are also bizarre, most of the other countries in the OECD are closer to the UK national health service model than the United States private provision model. For example, it gives us this gem:

“The U.K. spends well above the OECD average on health care, yet its outcomes fall short of Australia, Denmark and South Korea, which spend less as a percentage of their GDPs. Reform is largely impossible because of a religious-like devotion to the NHS. Once someone gets an entitlement, it becomes virtually impossible to pull it back — no matter how costly or inefficient.”

Denmark has a national health care service similar to the UK system, while both Australia and South Korea have single payer type systems. The “religious-like” devotion to an inefficient system appears to be far more a problem for the Washington Post editorial writers than anyone in the UK.

It is probably also worth noting that healthcare costs have increased rapidly as a share of GDP since 2019. This is likely at least partly due to Brexit. Separating from the EU both slowed GDP growth and likely increased costs due to less access to workers in the rest of Europe.

The other editorial celebrated the big write-down on EV factories by Ford and the EU’s decision to back away from its ban on all new gas and diesel automobiles as of 2035. Both these decisions should be viewed as far more a response to Trump’s efforts to promote global warming than the economics of EVs.

Trump has made it clear that he will do everything he can to slow the adoption of EVs. In an administration that openly gives favoritism to companies that do Trump’s bidding, as Post owner Jeff Bezos knows well, it should hardly be surprising that a major auto manufacturer would announce that it’s backing away from EVs.

Similarly, with Trump having declared war on democracy in Europe, it’s not surprising that the EU would back off a measure that provokes the manchild’s anger. The extent to which this means a retreat from EV production remains to be seen.

As far as the economics is concerned, the answer is already clear for anyone who pays attention. China already produces high quality low-cost EVs. Their charge time is as low as 5 minutes, roughly the same as the time to fill a tank of gas. And their share of new car sales in China is now close to 60 percent.

If the point is to save households money, in addition to saving the environment, both the United States and the European Union would move quickly towards 100 percent EV sales by both importing Chinese cars and also arranging for a technology transfer to allow them to be produced here. It is politics, not economics, that prevents us from going this route.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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