"I am pleased that the President has signed an Executive Order this week requiring federal agencies to disclose information about prices and quality of healthcare services"
About this Quote
A Revolutionary-era soldier congratulating a president on an executive order about healthcare price transparency is a time-travel glitch that accidentally reveals something true: the modern state has turned everyday survival into an administrative problem, and we now treat executive paperwork the way earlier generations treated battlefield victories.
The line is built to sound civic-minded and reasonable, but its real work is legitimizing a particular kind of reform: not expanding care, not guaranteeing access, but making the healthcare marketplace more legible. “Requiring federal agencies to disclose” frames the issue as a bottleneck of information, not power. It shifts attention away from insurers, hospital systems, and consolidation, toward the comforting notion that if consumers can just see “prices and quality,” rational choice will do the rest. Transparency, in this framing, isn’t a tool; it’s an alibi.
The praise itself is strategic. “I am pleased” reads like polite deference, yet it’s also a public cue to treat the executive order as meaningful action, even though executive orders often repackage existing authority, rely on uneven compliance, and collide with the reality that healthcare pricing is famously bespoke. Pairing “prices” with “quality” also smuggles in a promise: that quality can be measured cleanly enough to shop for, as if choosing a surgeon were like comparing phone plans.
If we accept the anachronism as metaphor, the subtext is stark: citizenship now includes being a price-conscious patient, and political virtue is reduced to applauding the release of data.
The line is built to sound civic-minded and reasonable, but its real work is legitimizing a particular kind of reform: not expanding care, not guaranteeing access, but making the healthcare marketplace more legible. “Requiring federal agencies to disclose” frames the issue as a bottleneck of information, not power. It shifts attention away from insurers, hospital systems, and consolidation, toward the comforting notion that if consumers can just see “prices and quality,” rational choice will do the rest. Transparency, in this framing, isn’t a tool; it’s an alibi.
The praise itself is strategic. “I am pleased” reads like polite deference, yet it’s also a public cue to treat the executive order as meaningful action, even though executive orders often repackage existing authority, rely on uneven compliance, and collide with the reality that healthcare pricing is famously bespoke. Pairing “prices” with “quality” also smuggles in a promise: that quality can be measured cleanly enough to shop for, as if choosing a surgeon were like comparing phone plans.
If we accept the anachronism as metaphor, the subtext is stark: citizenship now includes being a price-conscious patient, and political virtue is reduced to applauding the release of data.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
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