Standard Mischief

I’ve stolen the above title from tgirsch over at Lean Left. That and the statement that both Canada-style and USA-style health care has serious flaws are the only bits worth repeating. I was hoping that he’d also make one of his typical smarmy statements about the “free market”, but alas that was not the case. Truth is that both systems need a IV transfusion of a little free market to break out if their anemic slog.

tgirsch rightly spanks this WSJ article though. Although the author David Gratzer does come out strongly for the USA system, he does fail to note any shortcomings, and he drops the ball when it’s his turn to propose some solutions. Hmmm, maybe if you buy his book you’ll get those answers. (Yup, he’s writing in the WSJ to plug his new book) Hopefully, I’ll be picking up that ball and running with it.

I’m planning on a few posts over the next few days. I’ve had them kicking around in my head for a while, I suppose this quote it what spurred me to get started on them:

tgirsch Says:

[For the record, I don’t support adopting a strictly Canadian-style health care system. Instead, we should survey the top health care systems in the world and selectively pick the best aspects of them to build a world-class health care system for everyone, not just the well-to-do...

Sounds pretty good offhand, however he goes on:

...Unlike Canada, I’d also allow private practitioners to provide pay-out-of-pocket care to those who are willing and able to do so, noting that doing so does not exempt you from paying your share toward the larger system. Think of this like education, where putting your kids in private school, home schooling them, or simply not having any kids are all perfectly legal options, but they do not exempt you from chipping in to pay for the school system.]

Now despite the fact that he’s willing to travel the world to sample the very best ideas in health care, in the very next sentence he’s already got what he thinks is the perfect solution, one which would undoubtedly be the rose-colored glasses he’d view every other solution through. What bothers me most, however, is the knee-jerk assumption that more government regulation and control are what’s needed, not less.

Now I’m not going to claim that our national public school system is utterly broken, because it isn’t [1], but the reason why is because there really isn’t a national public school system. Oh sure there’s the federal boondoggle that is the school lunch program and the No Child Left Behind crap, but by and large the public schools are controlled locally, and funded with largely local funds to boot. This one fact that there’s a lot of control locally Is what I believe prevents public education to be the typical federal bloat-aucracy that I would expect it to be. His analogy breaks down here because I’m assuming his idea is that if you resided in Maryland and were vacationing in Tennessee and for some reason needed emergency care, his idea would be that the local health care system would not turn you away, or charge you cash prices because you were not funding the local emergency care network with your property taxes. That kinda thing does happen every day with our public school system. Every once in a while they catch a congress-critter trying to enroll his/her offspring in Montgomery County Maryland schools, instead of the District of Columbia’s public school system, even though the representative in question resides in the District (that’s because DC’s schools are horribly broken, compared to some of the local suburbs).

A better analogy might be our public retirement system, also called Social Security. Here, everyone pays in to the system according to their income, (except for a certain white religious minority), and everyone dips into the same retirement pool when they are eligible to receive payments. Except that if your income is still too high, you get taxed on those benefits at a higher rate. Except that we’ve let our congress-critters (Republicans and Democrats alike) steal the Social Security trust fund, transferring it by decree into the general fund, and leaving the Social Security Administration with a pocket full of IOUs not worth the paper that they are printed on. Except we’ve allowed ourselves to be saddled with a de facto citizens ID card, originally not intended for identification purposes at all, yet now has transformed itself into an essential ID number, without which one can not function today in society. Except that very same ID number has been used and abused as a way to violate the privacy of citizens by public and private parties for decades.

So now that I’ve trashed tgirsch’s proposed system (and by extension, Canadian style health care, HillaryCare, single-payer health care, socialized medicine, universal health care, and any other related name from the euphemism treadmill for the same socialist crap), where are my solutions? Well for that, you’ll have to wait until my next few blog posts. To preview, the problem with US style health care is that there’s little incentive to control costs. More on this later.

[1] I will interject here that I’m a strong advocate of vouchers, and abolishing public schools altogether, letting the private schools compete with each other and cater to the educational wishes of their customers.