House of Eratosthenes

The details aren’t necessary to discuss, but once again we’re contemplating the sad state of health care in this country because, at pharmacy point-of-sale, I made the discovery that my fiance’s health insurance plan is about as useful as a bag without a bottom.

And also, once again: We have to have some sympathy for the people who want to support the latest whiz-bang government-intervention odyssey into the health care market. This is how the ambition starts, isn’t it? “So-and-so needs a pill that costs a quarter of a million dollars, just to live.” It certainly gives one a feeling that Something Must Be Done. And, anybody who stands in the way, or mutters so much as a squeak of resistance, must think of human lives as disposable and must therefore be some kind of a monster.

You know, it occurs to me, maybe that’s where we’re running into trouble. This idea that if a thought is understandable — if a feeling is understandable — then it is wrong to resist it in any way. EVER. The passionate thought has to go to Capitol Hill, it has to get into the books, everyone has to vote for it, it has to become the law of the land and then if it doesn’t net the results we wanted, we have to live with whatever it is forever. And then we have to pass a whole bunch more laws just like it. Where’d we get this, anyway? How and when did it become wrong to say “I understand your agitation, but there are reasons why we can’t do this.” That is precisely what so-called “customer service” people say to us every hour of every day, when our everyday grievances, demands and requests are so much more reasonable than allowing government to take over [blank] yet again. Somehow, that’s the one desire that never seems to run into the boilerplate I-understand-but-proceed-no-further-barrier, even though that’s the one desire that should.

All these horror stories. I asked one of the horror story peddlers a couple years ago: What would happen if you went to the emergency room with this in, let us say, the 1980’s? Would you have been stuck with a $3,000 bill then? Absolutely not. Okay, then…that’s like, the first rule of problem solving, if the problem is a relatively recent problem, review the history. What changed? What’s different? Too many people aren’t doing this. Obama comes up with a plan that has “health” and “care” in the title…anyone following the news, knows how He got it, He just said to Congress “Write something down that has ‘health’ and ‘care’ in the title, and send it to Me.” Wham, bam, thank you ma’am…and we’ve all got to support this because Something Must Be Done.

I just got done writing down something about the insane. Well, the incompetent represent a big problem too.

My confidence in my retirement plans has always been rather fleeting. Like many Americans, I’m worried about outliving my savings. We’re all probably more concerned about this than we ought to be, even though the future may reveal we’ve been less troubled by it than we should be. If all goes well, I expect during my lifetime to see this cycle repeated maybe four more times — politicians put out some new government health care intrusion scheme on display, and every nitwit who ever paid more than he expected for an “inhalator” will yell “Yes, yes, things are terrible, we’ve got to do something!” After four or five of these, what will the state of health care in the United States be? Will life, for an 85-year-old man in 2051, continue to be affordable? I don’t think we can afford this over the long term, right now, with the nitwits running around voting yes on this stuff.

No, a bottle of pills half-full of cotton should not cost a hundred and ten dollars. Yes, there’s a reason that it does…and no, “greed” is not the explanation. The guy selling you a box of paper clips for 89 cents wants to make a profit, too; he’s greedy, too. But you’re only paying 89 cents. Clue?

Go home and do some thinking, you nitwits. Something’s terribly wrong when the rest of us have to choose between becoming a burden on our children and grandchildren, and taking your vote away.

You may want to start with Milton Friedman’s famous quote: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

How and when did it become wrong to say “I understand your agitation, but there are reasons why we can’t do this.”

My guess would be: when we, as a society, abdicated parental responsibility for raising kids and instead turned it over to the state, via public schools (and the associated, subsidized before- and after-school programs), subsidized daycare, no-fault divorce, mandatory self-esteem in the curriculum, etc.

Saying some version of “I understand your agitation, but there are reasons why we can’t do this,” is pretty much 95% of what parenting IS if you’re doing it right. Minus the sociological verbiage and the ad hominems, pretty much all liberal rhetoric these days boils down to “that’s not faaaaaair!!!” and “but I waaaaant it!!”

Back when parents actually raised their sprogs, the answers to those two objections were “who said life is fair?” and “tough noogies,” respectively. Learning to follow one parents’ reasoning and internalizing some of that self-discipline was what growing up meant. These days, the overgrown adolescents in academia, the media, and the Democratic party (I repeat myself twice) keep insisting that everyone can have everything he wants if he’s just willing to whine loud enough and long enough.

First thing I do when I’m dictator: tear down all departments of “education,” then salt the earth so nothing will ever grow there again.
- Severian | 12/05/2011 @ 08:37

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