Life

For the past three mornings I have woken up to Morning Edition on my local NPR station talking with some “experts” about the banking and medical industries in the U.S. I find it absolutely ridiculous how easily these experts speak of providing the correct incentives and punishments to these two industries to shape things for more efficiency and fairness. Who do they think they are, omniscient gods? The U.S. medical industry is over a $1 trillion industry annually and the billions, if not trillions of transactions are extremely complex and not able to fit under a one-size-fits-all command-and-control solution. I find it arrogant and very disingenuous to suggest that a small group of politicians (aka lawyers) can correctly design or even guide these industries into “what they should be.”

NPR, in general, has had a lot of recent programs talking to these types of people and the interviewers do not seem to press their guests as to why they are more capable than your average citizen in designing something that is not able to be designed. To think otherwise is to be part of an elite group of people who have their heads in the clouds. Or should I remind everyone that industry design on a national scale was tried many times with one of the most egregious examples being the U.S.S.R. It didn’t work, it still doesn’t work, and the U.S. is not any smarter or different. This type of thinking and action only takes away the freedoms of which the U.S. was founded on when the founders tried to escape from the design-crazy Europe. The government and their elite co-conspirators are going to lead the U.S. into a country that can no longer do anything. It won’t be fair, it will prop up certain minority groups who have the most money to lobby, and it will turn into a country of stagnation, low wages, little freedom, and a VERY powerful political class.

NPR, if it so desires to be comprehensive in its coverage of the healthcare debate, should also have reports questioning on whether the government is even capable of fixing rising healthcare costs. Investigate and report on the fact that most politicians are not trained in any of the industries that they seek to legislate and thus direct. Why not investigate from other experts like Prof. Russ Roberts of George Mason University whether staying out of the medical industry is a better idea? Maybe the politicians need to undo past mistaken legislation that gives skewed incentives to companies to provide health insurance only. Why not get rid of the entirely unfair laws that restricts U.S. citizens from buying health insurance across state lines? NPR is a somewhat tax-funded media source. As a tax-payer, I would like to see this kind of reporting. Please prove me wrong that publicly funded media is not an outlet for bigger government and government-favored solutions only. I want to hear all sides – government and the opposite of government.

Political design, elite, experts, healthcare, Morning Edition, NPR, politicians

I woke up this morning to NPR doing a report on how some health insurance companies deny coverage to people once they file a claim. They went a step further and said that some of these people were denied present and future coverage even though they abided by all of the rules. NPR was trying to vilify this action, as they should since it is shady, but they are on a streak of trying to make the current health care system look so horrible that we the population will be clamouring for government-run healthcare. Nice try NPR, but you’ll have to try harder than that.

NPR even cited the number of people who this happens to and it’s just under 10,000 people in the entire country. Let’s do some math. There is an estimated 310,000,000 people in the country. If we take very conservative numbers and say that half of those people are adults who currently work, and then subtract 40,000,000 for the “uninsured,” we get 105,000,000 insured working adults. If we take 10,000 and divide that by 105,000,000, we get 0.000095238, or 0.0095% of the working population. NPR wants reform for 105,000,000 people based on shady practices to 0.0095%! There are more people that die from the common flu each year and yet we don’t talk about throwing out the current healthcare system so that 20,000 flu victims don’t die. Life is full of risks and the government is worse at eliminating risks than are a free and prosperous people independent of the government. This is why I call it idiocracy, NPR is no better than Fox News for sensationalism.

For all of you who think that universal healthcare is a utopia, don’t come crying to me when you can’t get the immediate care that you need because there are too many other people in line ahead of you. Economics is about the rationing of scarce goods in the most fair and balanced way. Politicians are not better at this than a market system where people, not politicians, place the value of goods and services like scarce healthcare resources. To anyone that thinks otherwise, I invite you to start a debate in the comments to this post.

On a related subject of government run healthcare, I submit this article as some more food for thought. The moral of the article, how are we going to afford government-run healthcare when we already have a national debt of $11 trillion and up to $50 trillion of unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Medicaid. How exactly is government-run healthcare more cost effective?

Economics, Political healthcare, idiocracy., NPR, rationing