Categories
politics

Federal healthcare woes

[today’s run: nothing yet]

I’ve listened to the audio of the Supreme Court arguments about the Affordable Care Act.

It has been an interesting time of reflection.

In the summer of 2009 I went to a “town hall” meeting on the CSU campus in Fort Collins, CO.  First term Democratic Rep Betsy Markey had a difficult day.  There were so many people lined up, she took them in bunches.  For my bunch she basically said that a federal healthcare law was necessary.

To me it was a classic case of the “elephant in the room.”  What is true, but what she never said, is that the federal government is already so immersed in the health care economy that they are driving the prices and shaping the market.  And their participation is probably a substantial part of the market’s dysfunction.

The federal government “needs” a healthcare policy only because the federal government is bleeding cash on entitlement healthcare systems and on employee healthcare benefits.

But Rep. Markey never mentioned that.  It was all approached from the angle that some substantial portion of the population is priced out of the healthcare market and we need to have compassion about those folks.   I remember there was a small mention of “bending the curve” on costs.  The idea there was that some scale efficiencies could be brought into the picture.  The part that I missed in that line was, since the federal government already is neck deep in forming the healthcare market, how is doing more of the same supposed to fix the problem?

Political conservatives are frequently depicted as being afraid of change, constantly arguing against the “slippery slope” that will take us from this small change straight to some unintended, uncontrollable future.  Guess what?  President Johnson started this slope with his “Great Society” invention in the late 1960’s.  And the normal course of events has brought us where we are.

I don’t have any particular insight into the world of government or healthcare, so feel free to disagree.  I recommend articles by Megan McArdle if you want to find out more.