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The answer is government. What is the question?
Michael Swickard
“Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.” – P.J. O’Rourke
The mantra for the last half of the 20th century: The answer is government. Few of us were alive back when that was not so. Our government attempts to be all things to all people in all ways and at all times. This is what many people want to hear: The answer is government.
The government spends its time being nosy about my habits, such as if I intend to eat palm oil. They work hard to make sure I cannot, for my own good. I could go on, but it just makes me sick, and you know where that takes me: to the government rules on health care.
For every person who has said it is a good thing for the government to get into health care because it will make it much better, cheaper, more fair and whatever else people have promised, I have a story. I am generally happy and spend much of the day laughing and talking with people. I do very occasionally lose my charm. Let me tell you about the last time.
Insulin, but no needles
The other day I went to my pharmacy. I am an insulin-dependent diabetic. I went to get more insulin. How complicated could that be? I have done the same thing for years. There was a catch this time.
As I got my insulin I said, “Oh, and I ordered needles to use the insulin.” The pharmacy assistant at the counter gave a visible shudder, stuttered and finally blurted out, “The government rules do not allow us to dispense needles to you at this time.” The person hoped I would say, “Oh, fine, guess I will just get along with my insulin but no needles. Well, thanks, have a nice day.”
Nope. I did not do it. I just lost my charm. And, I did not find it standing at the pharmacy.
Instead, I asked, “Are you comfortable giving me insulin without needles?” The issue was not who would pay for the needles; rather, it was that I could have the insulin but no needles. The assistant reiterated that it was due to a government rule, with a convincing nod of the head. Government rules must be followed.
I turned to the pharmacist. “How about you?”
The pharmacist shook his head sadly. “No, I’m not.”
I left the store with my insulin, but no needles. Government rule, give insulin, cannot give needles. Go figure. Who did this? The answer is the government. I thought of the P. J. O’Rourke quote, “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
After a few days and some dialog, I got needles.
What is destroying our country?
In newspapers and on television you will find the notion that cradle-to-grave government is the answer. No matter how many times this is shown to me, I am not buying it. Government protection is an illusion, despite what the homeland security secretary just said on the border – that the southern border has never been more secure. I am just not buying that notion, either.
The notion is that our government knows what it is doing economically when it borrows money from China so it can send some of the borrowed money back to China as foreign aid. Does it make any sense that about half of everything being spent by the national government is borrowed with no plan to pay any of it back? Who has no plan whatsoever to ever pay back the borrowed money? The answer is government.
Maybe things will get better. I have always been an optimist about the future. But it is getting harder. This government sells itself to the highest bidder and then pays those political debts with borrowed money. Not just now. For 40 years, government has taken our social security money each year and spent it without saving even one cent of it. Who did it? The answer is government.
At some point we Americans have to get beyond the notion that the answer is government and look at the question: What is destroying our country? I will not keep you in suspense. The answer is this government.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.
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Mr. Molitor:
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on completely avoiding what I actually said. I will (for now) take that to mean that my interpretation was accurate.
However, in response to your query: I would have zero problem with a mandate if it were coupled with an actual universal option; instead, the mandate remained, but the public option died in an attempt to appease an entire party that was never going to vote “yay”, thus making the whole thing meaningless. That being said, I would like to make two points.
First, the origins of the individual mandate are, specifically, Republican. In the mid-nineties it was the GOP counter-proposal to the Clinton plan. Indeed, it was the entire GOP counter-proposal, completely absent a way for average Americans to pay for it. The same people who find it so objectionable now didn’t seem to have a problem with it a decade-and-a-half ago when it was their only idea.
Secondly, despite scare tactics to the contrary, this country is losing ground in over-all comparative quality of health care even faster that we are in comparative quality of education. Since we now spend more per capita on health insurance than any other country on the planet and still are failing to insure around one-in-seven Americans, I’d say that the current system is clearly not working, and suggesting that we let the nigh-on mystical (and thankfully almost completely mythical) libertarian idea of a “free market” solve the problem – by letting the people who actually need health insurance to die – is hardly a solution to the problem.
IP:
Do you think the federal government should make it mandatory for you to buy health insurance? Or mandatory to buy anything?
There is an achievement gap in government; a distance between the government we have (riddled with incompetence an corruption) and the government we should have (transparently accountable to meaningful standards of conduct and competence within politics and public service). The government we could, should, and would have, if we were talking about how to eliminate the gap rather than squabbling over semantics and sharing endless anecdotes to further illustrate even the most basic premise.
There are a lot of people making a lot of money by polarizing politics.
I doubt that people screaming at each other over a table, across a street or over a border, will ever arrive at the best solutions. Or at any real solutions; solutions that don’t guarantee the fight will be fought again at the next election cycle.
Where is the council of minds that can generate some real a-partisan reform?
Where are the people who can sit around a table without name calling and the rest of the nonsense crippling reform.
The biggest crippler of all of course is procrastination. People who argue that it will take years of hard work and money to webcast the legislature to a searchable archive, make it take take years of hard work and money. When in fact, in could be done rather immediately.
There is a bill of very few words that pushes webcasting to its practical limit. There is a bill that pushes the surrender of public records to their practical limit. There is a bill that raises the standards of conduct for politicians and public servants as high as they will ever be raised; high enough to protect the public interests from corruption and incompetence in public service. There is a bill that makes accountability to the standards as inescapable as it will ever be.
The bill hasn’t been written as far as I know.
But if it were, and everyone who cared about whether or not it passed, went to the legislature to make sure that it did, it would.
And the achievement gap would be closed; relatively over night.
But let’s not do that. Instead, let’s do what we have always done,
let’s nit pick endlessly, and expect different results.
Patience is an enemy of reform. It can be used to disguise a multitude of sins; lack of character, lack of courage, lack of interest, lack of caring, lack of …
Sacrifice is the currency of commitment. I would suggest that it is time for those with a genuine commitment to fixing the system so it can fix the problems, start making the sacrifices that must be made, to make sure the reform happens not years from now, but now. “The right time to do the right thing is always right now.” unk
Mr. Molitor:
So let me see if I’m getting this straight: your argument against a healthcare bill that you still use a wildly-inaccurate propagandized name for has nothing to do with mandates, or the typical Constitutional argument that few legal experts actually agree with, or the also-popular argument about cost to the taxpayer that even fewer economists agree with. Instead, your opposition to the bill is specifically that the portion of our population who actually need to use their health insurance are bad for business.
That is a truly ballsy position, my friend.
Micheal,
Your postings are always boots-on-the-ground experiential based rather than policy wonk from afar and I appreciate them. Plus, anyone who quotes P. J. Rourke is a comrade of mine!
Critics are correct that markets will not provide health insurance to everyone. Voluntary insurance pools often will not cover medical conditions that are known to exist at the time an individual enrolls.
Health insurance markets are completely justified in not covering preexisting conditions. If they did, few would purchase insurance until they had an expensive medical condition, and the pool would unravel. Thus, there is a very good reason why markets will not deliver universal coverage.
This is why ObamaCare should be repealed in the 112th Congress this year.
While I totally empathize with Michael Swickard’s frustration in his story, I agree with Michael Hays–private or public, bureaucracies in general are the issue. Business, especially the health care business, is often every bit as cold and tyrannical and money-sucking and non-sensical as what Mike S. perceives government is-with the added insult to injury that we lose many of our civil protections when we deal with a private corporation.
I find that no matter what the situation, your own personal mindset determines who or what you blame in a given situation. I, for example, would have gotten mad at the pharmacy because it is obvious that the corporation they work for does not value using logic, judgment and persistence in assisting a customer. Instead, it creates an environment of either laziness or fear of breaking a rule that means that I, the customer, have to do their work for them.
ftrplt–
Except for those who have already made up their minds on ideological grounds, reasonable people of sound mind and judgment usually take the utter failure of an argument as grounds to reject its conclusion. Who needs to fill one’s mind with uninformed or illogical stuff and to agree with it? Who needs to give such stuff the benefit of the doubt?
If the conclusion has any soundness, then surely someone ought to be able to support it with facts and logic. In the absence of which, a person might suspect that the case cannot be made for the conclusion.
Dear Friends, we all agree that Michael made a leap of faith in his argument, however, if you know Michael, just stick with the point he is making rather than attacking his composition. For anyone who doesn’t feel the government is broken, I truly feel sorry for you. Take a second and look at the national debt, the continual squabbling in the house and senate. The proposed draconian cuts to the military, medicare and the Lord knows how many other programs.
Why must you be a millionaire to get elected to Congress? Why do we keep electing the same political hacks in New Mexico. Why can’t a decent, well educated man like Cervantes get elected to be speaker? Why don’t we just elect the best qualified individuals to office? With what is going on now we definitely need a third party. Not the radical Tea Party, but a party that is ethical, decent, fiscally responsible, intelligent and God fearing? I hope we soon find a leader that meets that criteria, otherwise we will continue to dig a massive hole for our children and their children and their childres and on and on.
Michael, your entire column rests on a belief that one swallow DOES make a summer. You go from the failure of the government to provide you needles immediately to a claim that the government is destroying the country. A freshman English paper which advanced from a personal grievance about one bureaucratic or regulatory stupidity to a generalized indictment of government would be severely marked down–at least in the old days or in my class. By the way, your logic would work fine in dealing with some of the behavior of health insurance companies; they make decisions which damage people’s health or cause their deaths. Here’s my story, with the “dialogue.”
My step-daughter went to a center to treat bulimia. The health insurance company agreed to cover 7 days; I complained, and it agreed to cover 4 more days. Her college policy permitted up to 60 days coverage if required for treatment. The medical company supporting the insurance company defined full treatment as the re-establishment of certain physiological balances. I told the insurance agent that, since I would spend as much on treatment as on a lawyer, I would hire a lawyer and sue, and possibly do some good. I told him that I would sue not only the insurance company, but also the medical company and every employee of that company whose name or initials appeared on my step-daughter’s medical records. I told him that I knew that the medical personnel looked at physiological ranges only, without any regard for, much less expertise in, the disease itself, which is not medically defined as merely a matter of imbalances (as health insurance companies well known because they refuse to issue coverage to people who have had bulimia, which often recurs and causes other health problems). I said that I would sue for malpractice, seek the license of every practitioner, ensure adverse publicity for each of them, and ensure that they would come to regard a job driving a taxi as a very satisfactory alternative to living in shelters for the homeless destitute. I got a very prompt response: full coverage for an additional 49 days.
You did not get needles from the government right away because of a screw-up; my step-daughter was threatened with insufficient treatment of a commonly recurring and damaging, if not deadly, disease because the health insurance company needed its profits more than it thought that my step-daughter needed her health or her life. Thank you for asking: after even more personally financed treatment, she is fully and permanently recovered.
The moral of the story: bureaucracies are sometimes just stupid because they are bureaucracies, and they exist as much in business as in government. Government may be especially stupid, but business is usually greedy as well as stupid, for “stupidity” pays.
I agree, Mr. Hinton. It does seem to me that people who worry about the destruction of this country seem to have very little faith in our demonstrable stability.
I challenge the assertion that *anything* is destroying the country. Moreover, blaming “the government” for “destroying the coutnry” is, well, paranoid. Granted, something has destroyed the faith and confidence of a frightened minority in this country. But I don’t see anything reassuring them, especially as long as somebody makes money scaring them further.
Then you must be consistent. If the government needs to stay out of YOUR business, it needs to stay out of MINE, as well. Therefore, if I need an abortion or a morning after pill, or if I choose to marry a person of the same gender as myself, the government needs to get the hell out of my pants.