On Monday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius appeared on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show." It's a nightly ritual for me to catch Mr. Stewart's program, and it's even better when his segments and guests overlap with topics I'm actually involved in.
Secretary Sebelius has appeared on the program before, and as Mr. Stewart has shown on occasion, he's not afraid to dish out tough questions to powerful people. On Monday, he took HHS to task by asking if the government can actually handle the exchanges amidst all their technical glitches. He also asked why the individual mandate couldn't be pushed back a year, similar to how the government delayed the employer mandate until 2015.
For the most part, Secretary Sebelius skirted around Mr. Stewart's questions. His question on the individual mandate delay points to a sticking point for Congressional Republicans. Although the Tea Party faction of the Republican party is the main reason the government shut down last week (a group Mr. Stewart called "crazy town" on the show), the debate over the individual mandate is somewhat legitimate. (Still, the law's funding shouldn't be used as a ploy to bring the country to its knees.)
But the most interesting part of the interview came toward the end. Secretary Sebelius said people are more likely to "live sicker and die younger" without health insurance — a valid point and main reason why President Obama's health reform law can be a positive thing. Mr. Stewart's counter, though, was perfect:
"Exactly, which is why I don't understand the idea of staying with a market-based solution for a problem where people can't be smart consumers," Mr. Stewart said of the exchanges. "There are too many externalities in healthcare. I honestly don't understand why businesses wouldn't jump at the chance to decouple health insurance from their responsibility and why the government wouldn't jump at the chance to create a single-payer system that simplifies this whole gobbledygook and creates the program that I think America deserves."
Secretary Sebelius admits single-payer could be a "more reasonable" solution, but ultimately, President Obama "did not want to dismantle the healthcare that 85 percent of the country had and start all over again."
You can watch both parts of the interview below. It's worth your while, if only to hear Jon Stewart sing "God Bless the USA."