White Wizard

Please stop spending so much

August 7, 2009 on 12:50 pm | In Category-less | No Comments

I know some people think Glenn Beck is out there, but I do think he brings up some good points:

(link)

Specifically, our government is spending too much.  We can’t afford a full re-write of Healthcare or offer a government option that competes with private insurance.  We can afford some reform to make healthcare more accessible but not a full rewrite.

Why?  Well, here’s what I’m thinking: if the government creates a government sponsored option, they will be competing with current healthcare providers.  We know the government option is going to cost less.  So, what will your employer do when faced with the choice every year: continue to offer the more expensive plan (private insurance) or switch all their employees to the lower-cost government one?

If your employer sticks with their private plan, great, right?  Well, what about the employer down the street?  What about a large corporation?  What if ExxonMobil switches?  Or GE? Or Wal-Mart?  If other companies switch but yours doesn’t, private insurance costs are going to go up.

Now fast forward another year or two.  The cost differential between government insruance and private insurance continues to widen.  How long do you think it will be before we have a single payer system (government run healthcare)?  How much is that single payer system going to cost?  Who pays for government programs?  How good do you think the coverage of the single payer system will be in comparison to how it is now? [1]

We already how Obama feels about single payer: (I’m not sure why this is “SHOCKING”, here’s a WSJ Article where he talks about it)

(link)

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So, I want the government to stop spending so much money.  I DO think that healthcare can be better and we can make simple changes to help things along (make it so there is a reward cap on malpractice cases so malpractice insurance doesn’t cost so much, do other simple things that people smarter would come up with but still don’t cost $1 trillion).

I DON’T think we should spend $1+ trillion to fundamentally change how the whole system will work.  I don’t even think we should spend $1+ trillion.  Let’s come up with something better.

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[1] I know other countries have government sponsored healthcare.  Do you want that type of healthcare?  What about scarcity: when we have to choose who gets a surgery because there are too many people and not enough doctors?  Who gets to have the surgery?  Are specialists going to want to spend 15+ years of their life becoming the absolute expert in their specialty and do it to get paid less money?

Let’s make small changes, let’s make things better through evolution, not revolution.