white with foam

Electricity? Check. Keyboard? Check. Half-baked opinions? By the drove. Looks like I’m qualified to weigh in on health care reform!

Here’s my $0.02: I’m quite disappointed that my representatives aren’t better equipped to defuse the situations they face at town hall meetings. Even Barney Frank’s retort, while demonstrating some badly needed backbone, was delivered on their level. I’m not saying that yahoo didn’t genuinely earn Frank’s wrath; I just wish someone would take what seems to me to be the easy shot, and give the loudmouths a chance to articulate their position. It’s so patently ill-considered, fear-based and removed from fact, it would just vanish under the slightest exposure.

This plan is socialized medicine, and that’s a bad thing. So what’s Medicare, or health co-ops, or the collectives of small employers that band together for group rates? How’s the service you get from those commies?

Those federal dunderheads can’t run a program as well as the good old free market can. You mean the free market that establishes exorbitant prescription price points, pays pharmaceutical executives so well, and perpetuates this broken system in the first place? That free market? If your faith in their ability to self-regulate and separate wheat from chaff is so thorough, then what’s wrong with another service provider with its own strengths and weaknesses? Public subsidies are a very effective field leveler to the tax breaks private companies receive, or vise-versa if you’re feeling threatened.

The nuttier claims will soon collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. However, I actually do have a concern about what happens when companies figure out they can offload their employees onto a public system. My fear is that if this becomes an accepted option, using the same arguments used so successfully to suck up TARP money, the fragile new network could suffocate. And it wouldn’t be the result of overzealous lawyering, or inept bureaucrats, or fraud or mismanagement, but the same old public risk/private gain model that’s been working so well for so few for so long. Meet the new boss!

That said, though, I’d be happy if what came out of all this kerfuffle is a modest, portable program that’s at least as good as a big-city co-op. I could see it developing into something that’s as government-y — and as genuinely useful — as public schools, Social Security or the National Guard.

Tags:   health care · public option · socialism2 Comments