With the Iraq war disappearing from the front page without the slightest drop in the “we can’t win” message being thrown around, I think I need to be seeking out more editorials like this one.
With the Iraq war disappearing from the front page without the slightest drop in the “we can’t win” message being thrown around, I think I need to be seeking out more editorials like this one.
1) Would this presidential election please get itself over with so that we can start evaluating the damage that will be done by whichever of these idiots wins?
2) Is there some possible way we could work this where both of the candidates lose (without putting a third party nutcase in there instead, that is)?
3) Is the new Dr. Who series worthy of a fanatic obsession involving large chunks of my time and risking the wrath of my wife? (This last one is obviously rhetorical)
Alright, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about health care (especially as my wife has developed some issues with her wrist and elbow), but it’s taken me weeks to calm down enough to write anything about it (see Rule #1). Now I find I’m not sure where to begin.
There’s been a ton of talk about our imperfect health care system and even more argumentation on how best to improve it. There are, of course, two camps that seem to have developed. Those who believe the answer is to expand government programs like Medicare/Medicaid to cover more Americans, and those, like myself, who tend to favor corporations stepping in and creating a competitive marketplace. I’ve got a number of arguments that I think are valid against the former and for the latter. And seeing as how this is my blog, well, I’m about to write them.
First off, let’s start with the negatives. I suppose I could present a number of articles here about systems like Canada’s or Great Britain’s, and go on and on about how their systems are so slow that people are having to pay out of their own pockets to get private care for serious problems as well as basic ones just to get care in a timely manner. I choose not to. This has been done to death. Plus, the Canadians and the British wouldn’t be managing any American national health care bureaucracy that would be created, the American government would. So instead, I’d like to look at the US government (state and local as well as federal) here. Before we hand over unbelievably massive amounts of the common worker’s (as well as thier bosses’) money to pay for said bureaucracy, I ask what their management track record is? They seem to be doing a bang up job with the public school system, airport traffic control, and our roads and bridges. I wouldn’t exactly call any of their large programs models of efficiency, reasonably budgeted or affordable to their consumers (by which I mean the people actually paying for the programs regardless of whether or not they actually are allowed to consume anything from the program, taxpayers), or even moderately resistant to wide scale corruption. Not to mention most of their employees seem to be rather dissatisfied with their jobs and highly underpaid by private market standards.
Now, I’m not saying that we need to throw away Medicare, make it legal for hospitals to turn away emergency patients because they don’t have insurance, burn down people’s houses and plunder and pillage our “weaselly black guts out”, as Captain Jack would put it. What I am saying is that the lower middle class and middle middle class would be much better served at much more reasonable prices (I personally believe that taxes hurt everybody) by treating medical treatment like other service industries. Expose it to more market forces and we’ll see someone who has a knack for running a company step in and become the Southwest Airlines, Walmart, or McDonald’s of health care. This is probably too radical for anyone to actually try, but if you made it illegal for companies to offer health care as an employment benefit, or otherwise force the insurance providers to compete for the business of individuals spending their own hard earned money, the price changes for basic services and coverage would come about almost overnight and would be dramatic. I think this is already the way the market is moving anyway, albeit quite slowly. Lots of small to medium sized employers either can’t afford to offer health care to their employees or are offering benefits that employees don’t find satisfactory. A lot more young people are looking to get their own insurance, absent of the company plan, or going without it altogether. There are already lots of advertisements from insurance companies that are geared toward individual consumers and not just business owners. Encourage these developments, encourage competition, focus the regulation on keeping things competitive between large providers of services and smaller ones instead of telling the consumers what to do, and I’ve got a track record to point to that’s much better than our government’s record in providing services.
Feel free to leave in place the programs designed to help people who genuinely still wouldn’t be able to afford the lowered prices for the basics that would come from this, the same way we do with food and legal representation, but leave the middle class alone. Don’t force sub par service on us along with higher taxes (even if it’s on our retirement plans via the Cap Gains Tax instead of hikes in our income taxes) to pay for that service when we could be getting better services cheaper just by letting companies compete for our dollars.
