Dear Flaco,
As the Blessed Leader is now looking at his third failed major cabinet post, we should review perhaps the biggest blow so far; the failure of Tom Daschle. You see, this post was his for the taking. In fact, if there was a man that was made for Team Obama to head up Health and Human Services, it was Mr. Daschle. He was the majority leader in the Senate and had the respect of his peers. Then, when he was kicked out of office by his voters left office he became a public speaker, and champion of a new Federal Health Care system; a reform if you will. He was, in short, ready to step into the job of a lifetime. A job that would transform the way in which health care is distributed in this country. A move that would take it from where it is now, in the hands of the private sector, and move it into the realm of the State.
However, more interesting than the man is the concept. Universal Health Care. Socialized Medicine. Whatever name it goes by, it won’t go–well, away.
Economics: The study of the use of scare resources which have alternative uses.
This is the definition of economics in a pretty basic book by the name “Basic Economics”. Fascinating read; I suggest it. But when you think of that definition, it kind of, or should, strike you what we are dealing with here. It doesn’t have to be money. It can be the study of how a teacher runs his classroom. He only has so much time and resources and, much of it, has alternate uses – he could something else for another child. Or, you could use it in game theory.We use it everyday in working through our “Honey Do” list….in fact, all of life, really, is a study in economics. Scare resources; time. And alternate uses; drinking beer or painting the baby’s room.
And so it is with health care. We have a scare resource; medicine, doctors, nurses and beds. And all of it has alternate uses. A nurse could instead choose to become a lawyer, a doctor a fighter pilot. Money or land spent to build a hospital could be used to build an apartment, or an office building or a football stadium. It’s all there, this — this study of things. This demand for something that we don’t have enough of. And in the end, that’s where we are. We have a demand for medical services and we don’t have enough supply. And if we can agree on that, we have agreed on one of the most important aspects of this debate. An aspect that no politician, Mr. Daschle himself in fact, will ever admit. Because, you see, when we have less of a thing than we want, we have to somehow hand it out so that someone doesn’t get everything that they want.
Please, please make sure that we are in agreement on this. We have more need/want than we have supply. There are more peope that want to see a doctor of some kind that we have ability to see. And that might be because we have too few docs, or beds or simply time in the day. Whatever, there is more need/want than supply.
This is important for this reason. Once we agree on the supply demand thingy, all that’s left is to determine how we ration it. Once we agree that we simply don’t have enough, all we have to do is determine how we will figure out who won’t get what. And ya know what? The single best system for determining that is the market. Free market. People will automatically regulate themselves and adjust so that supply meets demand. It does everywhere else. The best recent example is gasoline. Consider this:
I love my bride. We wake at 06.30 am and get ready for the day together. Then, we take the kids to school and we go to work where we spend the next 8-10 hours toiling away for
the man no more than 50 feet apart. After work, it’s dinner, the kids and bedtime. Serious. From midnight to 23.59, I am withing shouting distance of my wife 95% of the time. That’s a LOT of time dammit! And so it is, that while we work at the same place, eat at the same place and drop off/pickup kids at the same place, I insist that we do NOT carpool. Brotha needs his minutes yo! But when gas starting running $3.50 to $4.00 a gallon, I relented. I would work VO while she went to the office! hehehe, but you get the point. I self adjusted as the price became to much to bear, as did the entire market, and low and behold, gasoline went down.
So it is with the health care market. I have been over the numbers before. Many many of the “47 million uninsured” are uninsured due to choice! They choose NOT to obtain that insurance. Some can afford it but have decided not to obtain it. Others, LOL, others have the government assistance available to them but refuse to do the needful to get it. Point is, many Americans don’t WANT it.
And so, we have people come and say that they are going to offer some panacea of Nationalized Health Care. It sounds good, it does. But how, when we have accepted that we don’t have enough of it, are we going to provide it to everyone? How are we going to ration this scare resource so that it gets distributed to people? The answer, if the state is involved, is through political favors, bribes, wait times or “cost effective” measures. None of which are better than the system we have today.
Look, is there room for improvement? Yes. Most certainly that improvement comes in the form of LESS government and not more.
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Deep Friends - Deep Disagreements 