That's a pretty good find, I haven't found anyone else pointing this out. I don't have my copy of the book on me right now to look at that unfortunately as I'm on a trip.

Looks like a miss for him on Obama's take on jobs in healthcare (I even a tweet from what looks like Graeber's account musing about this Obama quote). I wish he was alive so we could email him about it.

Anyway, what we're looking for is logical fallacies in his critique of capitalism. You certainly found a mistaken attribution and thus incorrect assumption about the mindset of someone in power but as you indicate it kind of doesn't matter, because the core argument is that one argument against single payer healthcare (or just fixing America's objectively broken healthcare system) is that people will lose jobs as a result. Here's an article from Politico pointing this out: https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2019/11/25/medicare-for... . People do make this argument, about the healthcare industry and others.

So for his underlying point, that the American healthcare system is propping up a lot of bullshit jobs, you seem to disagree, but I don't think that counts for a logical fallacy. Having myself interacted with the American healthcare industry, I have to agree with Graeber. Each interaction involved a rat's nest of bureaucratic nonsense and tens of people. The hospital I went to had a person whose entire job was middle-manning the insurance companies and the patients. So we could start with Graeber's general argument that probably a lot of those jobs aren't really necessary. These companies seem to agree when they do waves of layoffs. It's not even really an anticapitalist argument.

The anti-capitalist critique part of the argument is that the jobs are bullshit because they don't help, or in fact harm, society. This is the "single payer would be better" argument. Again I don't find any logical fallacy here, just perhaps an argument you disagree with. It's a similar critique he applies in the mutual fund investor vs teacher argument: why does the mutual fund investor get paid more when teachers are more valuable? Why do Americans spend so much on healthcare when universal or socialized systems can give more healthcare to more people for less money? Whatever the Americans are doing simply isn't efficient, but it's propped up as a star of capitalist resource allocation: even here you seem to imply that simply critiquing the American healthcare system is somehow anticapitalist. Now that I think about it, actually, it's not anti capitalist to argue that the American healthcare system is inefficient, it's simply objectively true: Americans spend more on healthcare than anyone else, including countries with socialized healthcare.

However he is obviously anticapitalist and also takes the position that the jobs are bullshit because healthcare should be universal and thus insurance company jobs shouldn't exist (my interpretation). What's logically fallacious about this?

As for the argument that part of the reason the American government (not just pressure from think tanks or whatever) maintain this healthcare system because doing so props up a lot of jobs, which Graeber does incorrectly make based off a misquoted statement by Obama, yes, the chain of thought doesn't work, but it's not the only thing America props up for a jobs reason alone. The TSA, which fails the majority of its audits, is a rather famous example of an institution maintained by the USA simply as a jobs program. https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-secu...

Anyway, you did find a bad quote that I haven't seen anyone else point out, you may have some other pretty interesting insights to Graeber's book. I'd personally read a collection of "random half-page point by point" breakdown by you, it would interesting, and rigorous critique is important to me.

One other thing:

> Now ignore that The Nation is a leftist publication so the context of that quote is already suspect

I don't understand why this makes anything suspect? Nor do I see much to indicate The Nation is a leftist paper. I found this article as a good measuring stick: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-taiwan-war-mil... So certainly the paper is not a Tankie one, which would definitely make the whole thing suspect as simply a mouthpiece of the CPC, but it's clearly not, so I'm not sure what your concerns are, other than that it might lean different politically than you.