If It's Broken, Make it Bigger and Give it More Money

Sorry guys, I have to talk Cash for Clunkers (C4C) again. It came out this morning that dealers and manufacturers are giving up on the program. The problems stem from the Dept of Transportation not paying dealers for the cars traded in under the program (check out my last post on C4C for more details). So the dealers took it on faith that the government would pay them back for the $3,500 or $4,500 discount they have the consumer on the new cars. No the government mullah hasn't materialized and the dealers (who were already desperate for cash in the first place) are stuck with all this fictional cash. So GM has stepped in for some of its dealers and is providing cash advances to the dealers themselves. Let's keep in mind that GM just came out of bankruptcy on July 10th. How good of an idea is to have a company that come out from Chapter 11 protection a little over a month ago lending large sums of money to faltering dealers? It's not a good idea at all but GM has little choice in the matter, the federal government has forced the auto industry into a corner (as if they needed the government's help). Once again, lofty goals from the federal government results in downright dismal policy and implementation.










Ok, now let's move on, the program sucks, let it die. But let's not forget to learn from this (the now infamous "teaching moment", copyright Boh'Rock during the Gates incident). The government can come up with these grandiose plans with extremely noble goals (save the auto industry and decrease emissions for example) but when it comes to writing the policy to "get shit done" so to speak and finally putting that plan into action, the government is lousy, inefficient, and dog shit slow. This often exacerbates whatever problem was trying to be fixed in the first place and everyone ends up worse off.





So take the above lesson and ask yourself "After this exhibition of governmental failure to manage a relatively minor amount of money, $3 billion, do we really want to hand them the keys to the healthcare system worth MUCH more than $3B?"




I was talking to a few people about this today and I came up with an analogy that I know my parents can relate to:

Your kid wrecks a nice car worth a good amount of money that you bought him (like my first car, nice but not that fast). Do you go out and then buy him a $200,000 Lamborghini capable of 200+mph? Absolutely not.



I don't want the government crashing and burning at 200mph because, guess what, all of us are riding shotgun.
























source: http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/20/news/companies/clunkers_sales/?postversion=2009082010

The Fundamental Problem With Universal Healthcare in America

Lately there has been an ungodly amount of debate regarding Obama's version of universal healthcare (lovingly dubbed "Obamacare"). Most of the hubbub has been over if people will be able to keep their own doctors, what this means for existing insurance, and if this will impact the overall quality of care. Those issues I am not going to address here. There is a more basic, fundamental issue with universal healthcare in our country.

If we lay down the political arms for a few minutes and analyze our own lifestyles and routines, we see that we all make decisions using our own free will every day. Each of these decisions has an impact on a person's overall level of health. For example, Joe chooses to eat at McDonalds for dinner every night, drink ten beers daily, and to smoke a pack every day. Now I don't do any of these things because I have a certain level of respect for myself but, when it comes down to it, Joe has the freedom to make these decisions without anyone telling him otherwise. To be quite honest, this is exactly what I believe makes America great (cliche, yes, true, yes).

Now when Joe's unhealthy decisions catch up to him, he will inevitably have to enter the health care system for some sort of procedure. In days past, Joe either had insurance to cover these costs or he paid out of pocket. The financial responsibility for Joe's poor choices were on him and him alone. Under a universal healthcare system that is funded with taxpayer money, the general public has to bear the cost of Joe's decisions.

Nothing about what I've said thus far is groundbreaking but here is the paradox. A person that is free to make their own choices their entire life but doesn't have to bear any of the responsibility for the consequences of those actions does not have much incentive to act responsibly. If we take that logic and build upon it, we find that the next course of action should be to regulate the actions one can take during their lifetime to minimize the cost of healthcare (aka cost to the government and taxpayers) later in life. In Joe's case, this means regulating his caloric intake, requiring him to exercise, mitigating his drinking, and prohibiting him smoking. This would result in Joe being less of burden on the healthcare system.

How would you feel if the government told you what to eat, when to exercise, and what to do in your spare time? How American is that?

What I fear is that, if we implement Obama's proposed healthcare plan, we, as a nation, take one of three paths: (1 like described above) we continue to regulate what a person can and cannot do based on what impact that will have on the person's health or (2) we draw the line in the sand, refuse to regulate an individual's activities, and abandon the universal healthcare system or (3) refuse to regulate an individual's activities, keep the universal system in place and it bankrupts the country.

The results of those three paths respectively are: (1) a distopian future where everything is heavily regulated (for an example of what I'm talking about read A Brave New World or 1984), (2) we end up back where we are now but after burning through a whole lot of taxpayer dollars, or (3) the unthinkable.

So if we pull ourselves away from this partisan battle over the minutia of Obama's plan and look at what the real issue is here and how it can impact our entire nation, we can see there is no positive outcome.

In a fundamentally free country, a universal healthcare system is bound for failure so you need to get rid of one or the other. So choose: a free country or a universal healthcare system. Which will it be America?