Wow! Gone for just days and you have assembled armies of Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and some Mongolians, angry and armed, in support of your view. While we await the crumbling of your ideology and the abject surrender of your barbarian hordes, can I offer a guess and a few observations?
Obviously, there’s a bundle of intelligent and educated folks who favor government health insurance and control. Could they have been mislead?
Our views on economics generally trickle down from theoreticians at the top of the information pyramid. Until recently that peak was occupied by academics who believed in the efficacy of designed economies. Experience didn’t treat their ideas kindly and the remnants are reduced to defending the idea that certain sectors can be managed. The influence of that thinking lingers.
Twenty-odd years ago the Economist devoted most of an issue to a survey of health care around the globe. Different countries lead in different measures; it sticks that Singapore then lead in natal, the U.S. was middling, and Japan, with one of the heaviest incidence of tobacco use, was tops. They noted that there doctors and hospitals and insurers competed with the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker for the consumer yen.
In reviewing Britain’s NHS they featured an early 20’s young lady who waited in queue through early adulthood for correction of a serious facial disfigurement. She thought the NHS was just peachy, because it was “free”.
Warring factions can pull lots of links in support of their beliefs. This is typical of those I find credible. prairiepundit.blogspot.com
This piece recognizes the drag social programs have created elsewhere. Nationalized health care is often a big chunk of the problem. bizzyblog.com
The market required judicious application of tort law and contract enforcement – and great humility. Its successes create expectations that interference can rush delivery of desired outcomes, aka the fatal conceit. There are vexing questions involved. We will not stand by and watch some poor child do without something as vital as needed health care. The question is how best to achieve that. Do we drive costs up, a la John Edwards, or ignorant legislators with their mandates. Or do we strive to provide for those at the margins while letting the general level of wealth go up while the market drives medical costs down?
Incidentally, I also hold blind faith in groceries as a nutritional source. |
