.There is something very communal about citizens reduced to poverty by medical expenses, or just lack of employment due to health issues.
The community is affected but that doesn't mean that the key entity, the target entity, is the community.
Maybe I can explain it in terms of a data base. It's been a long time since I designed a data base and I'm not sure I remember the terminology or know if they're even using the same terminology. But the concept applies here. In our case we have two different entities, the country and the individual citizen. In our data base we would have a file or table for each. The record in the country file has a unique identifier for the country and a bunch of descriptors for that country, data about the country. The citizen file would have a unique identifier for the individual, SSN, and a bunch of data about the individual. It also contains the country id so the two files can be related in a parent-child fashion.
What we've been discussing is differentiating between what is about the country, belonging in the conceptual country file, and what is about the individual. They are different entities. It's a structural thing. The military is about the country. A broken leg attaches to the citizen. There would be a third file in our database that contains, in parent-child fashion, all the medical events for the citizen with its own unique identifier. In a database, it's critical to keep the entities and their children straight. Likewise when doing analysis of government programs. What characterizes welfare programs is that the country provides for personal expenses that would traditionally belong to the citizen. Military goes with or is about the country. Medical expense is associated with the citizen. Conceptually. It's necessary to be able to make that differentiation to have any kind of thoughtful discussion on the subject.
I'm not arguing that the country should not pay for citizens' personal expenses. I'm just trying to get across the point that we operate in a paradigm where persons traditionally pay for their own expenses. With an O-C frame, the country would pay for all the medical educational expenses of all individuals. That is a paradigm change. A PARADIGM CHANGE. IOW, a really big deal. When facing a paradigm change, we should not only sit up and take notice, we should consciously decide that that's what we want to do. Not just slide into it like the frog in the pot because it's sad that people face challenging medical or educational expenses.
The frog got into the pot when we started poverty welfare programs for food, housing, and medical care. We didn't want poor people dying in the streets. There seems to be close to a consensus on that. But now we're talking about not only the country at large helping out poor individual people but about a right to healthcare and education for everyone paid for by the country a large. We are entirely abandoning the notion that individuals pay their own expenses and adopting communal provision. We are shifting the responsibility for the provision of healthcare and education and who knows what in the future from the individual entity to the country entity. This is different. This is really, really different. Again, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do that, only that we consciously and deliberately recognize that it's a paradigm shift and that it has implications and externalities. It's not just about it being nice for individuals to not have to deal with the cost of college so, hey, let's have the country entity take care of it.
BS
Not BS. This is analysis 101. |
