Why is the government so bad at healthcare? Why did Obamacare make it more expensive than it already was? Is there a solution? Former Member of Congress Bob McEwen explains.
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Too much money for graft and too much money to buy votes. They’ll never do it. We’re moving to a “Cromwell” type moment here. Either elect them or else.
Steve Forbes had a great op-ed on why Medicaid is such a mess. Bottom line: Politicians want it to cover everyone and everything (including some Repubs like Kasich) and the cost is prohibititve – so the govt severely restricts what it will pay for various things.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2017/06/13/the-twin-horrors-of-medicaid-as-costs-go-up-it-harms-patients-more-can-congress-finally-fix-it/#407aedc7bc53
It’s very difficult for me to believe that we can’t do better than we are with this issue. The government seems to be the biggest stumbling block. I can’t think of a single major program of an ongoing nature that it hasn’t blundered and plundered.
It makes sense that the government is the stumbling block, for a number of reasons.
One is that they have no financial incentives. They simply grab our money for whatever they want, and if they don’t have enough they print some more (debasing the currency — in the real world this is called “counterfeiting”). So constraints of means isn’t a factor they understand.
Another is that they have no accountability. Government bureaucrats have a job for life, short of raping or shooting someone in plain view. Doing a good job isn’t relevant in their world.
Worse yet, doing a good job isn’t even desirable. Government agencies are created to “solve a problem”. They grow in response to a pretense that “more resources are needed to really fix the problem”. So the bigger they can make the “problem”, the more money and parasite bureaucrats they get. The one thing they definitely do NOT want to do is to actually fix the supposed problem they are supposedly fixing — if they actually did any such thing the agency might shrink, or maybe (hah) even close down — forcing them to find a real job.
Finally, the law is not something they care about. This is trivially obvious. Read the Constitution, in particular Article 1 Section 8. Can you find anything the government does that’s authorized by the plain English text of the Constitution? Not likely. As high ranking Democrat Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) admitted in a momentary lapse into honesty: “There’s nothing in the constitution that says the Federal government has got anything to do with most of the stuff that we do.” Violating the oath of office is something politicians do daily. All of them. In all branches of government.
All good points. And, with regards to the one about the Constitution, I understand there are those who would re-write it to establish what the Government can do.
I haven’t heard much talk about rewriting the Constitution, other than people pushing for more limited government. The left tends to talk about a “living constitution” which is a code phrase for a Humpty-Dumpty constitution: “when I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean, neither more nor less”. In other words, they want people to ignore the text and instead pretend that the constitution is whatever the fad of the week wants it to be. I suppose one might answer that with “how would you like a “living paycheck” for your job?”
The reason for the “living constitution” drug dream is that they know perfectly well the sort of things they are pushing for stand no chance of being adopted as actual amendments.
Yes, “re-write” in the sense of what you articulated, whether this comes through amendments or interpretation. The activist judges are a source of and a continual exacerbating of our chaotic national scene. The Legislative hasn’t helped with their ping-pong rules and procedures based upon on has the majority. The Executive Branch has been pushing us toward an Imperial Presidency, not good for the nation either.