With all the talk of national debt and deficit spending lately, I can’t help be reminded of the awful truth of the American economy: The economy runs on debt, or as it’s called by the savvy marketing types: credit. If everyone were to pay off their student loans, mortgages, car loans, and credit cards the American economy would collapse. While it is good for individuals to pay off loans quickly to be in a better financial position for the long term each dollar that you pay back on the principle of your loan shrinks the economy. What the hell am I talking about, you ask? Leverage.
If I went to the bank tomorrow and was granted a loan to buy a house, a mortgage, the bank would give me many thousands of dollars in bank credit to go out and purchase a house. They are not giving me actual money that they have in the vault. In fact, for each dollar they have in the vault they may have loaned out 10 or 20 dollars. Our government allows banks to give out bank credit in the form of US Currency. This means, that when I get a loan, the bank is conjuring into existence money. It is theoretical, ephemeral money but I will pay that money to the home owner who will likely take that money and put it towards a new house. An actual monetary transaction will have occurred but with money the bank created this morning! And the more that banks do this, the more money is flowing in the system. This is what was happening in the years leading up to 2008 and the crash.
Leverage is the ratio of actual money to credit that a bank has. If a bank has one dollar and they loan out 9 dollars, they are said to be leveraged at 9:1. If instead, they loan out 30 dollars and they have 1 dollar, the are leveraged at 30:1. Where this becomes a problem is if someone is unable to pay back the money. If I have $10 and give three people an IOU for $10, I’m fine until more than one of them tries to collect at a time. If a bank has given 30 people $100,000 mortgages based on them having $100,000 on hand, they’re screwed if more than one person is unable to pay them back. During the real estate bubble, banks thought nothing of giving nearly anyone a mortgage loan because the value of the property would likely increase and even if the borrower couldn’t pay back the loan, the bank would be able to seize the house and sell it for a profit. Once the bubble burst and they were no longer able to sell the house at a profit, or possibly even at all, the whole house of cards came close to collapsing. All that ephemeral bank credit in the form of US Currency went poof, and the economy contracted. The result was less less money in the system.
Which brings us to the United States National Debt. While deficit spending and increased national debt are a problem, having less money in the system (banks are wary of giving credit to people after getting burned) is more of a problem. While many people liken the US Government to a family that has to tighten the belt and balance the checkbook, the US is in actuality more like a business. Many businesses run on credit. Many were hurt badly or were closed down when they were no longer able to get credit to make payroll. The US Government runs on credit as well. Aside from a brief couple years in the 1830’s when we paid it off, the nation has always been in debt. (Oddly enough for those who think the national debt is purely evil, after Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt the country entered a huge recession.)
While skyrocketing national debt is worrisome, so long as we can afford the interest payments, debt on a national level is not as horrifying as many would have us believe. Again, we’ve been in debt since 1836 and the country hasn’t imploded yet. The debt allows us to add currency to the economy without as much risk of inflation. The government could simply print more money, conjure it into existence much like the banks do, but without the value that comes from having to pay it back, it would cause the currency as a whole to drop in value, diluting the value of the dollar. This is important because unlike the banks which have $1 to back the several dollars they loan out, the currency of the United States is backed only by the good faith of the American Government. Comforting, I’m sure to those who have no faith in the American Government.
And to the idea of balancing the nation’s checkbook, there are two ways to reduce deficits just as there are two ways to pay off debt in your household. You can cut your spending on everything else, subsist on Ramen and put all your money into paying off your debt. It isn’t a pleasant way to live, but may pay off long-term. The other way you may have little control over, but it’s to increase your income. Get a better paying job, or a second (or third) one. In the Government’s case, this would involve raising taxes. Those who are hell-bent on reducing the national debt never seem to be open to this idea, for some odd reason or other. (It also seems strange that I didn’t hear a peep out of them about the deficit spending and increased national debt during the Bush administration, but that’s another post.) And there’s no reason you can’t do both. Cut unimportant programs and remove tax cuts. It’d be wildly unpopular, but if you’re truly in favor of reducing the national debt, that’d be the way to go. Of course, in so doing you would be removing 13 trillion dollars from the nations economy. I imagine with money being scarce enough as it is, we may want to rethink that plan until the banks are once again in the conjuring mood. Perhaps once we have some regulation in place to make sure they don’t go too crazy with it again.
There’s been a lot of debate for months now on the health-care reform bill in congress. A lot of groups on both sides absolutely hate it. Those on the right call it “Socialist” despite it not coming anywhere close to actual socialized medicine. Those on the left call it a gift to the health insurance corporations. What it is really is a gutted compromise that will be better than nothing, but certainly won’t solve the problem long-term. In order to better understand the debate, let’s look at some health care options.
The basic idea behind health insurance is that you take a large group of people and pool their resources so that if one of the group gets sick, the others pay for their treatments. It’s a bad deal for the healthy people but pays off once it’s their turn to get sick or injured. A simple example would be 10 people who pool together and each one pays $100 a month. One of them gets sick, there is $1000 per month available to pay for their treatment. If two of them get sick, there’s $500 for each of them. As long as the number of sick people do not overwhelm the pool all at once, there’s plenty of money for their treatment, and in the long term the pool gains in value. If more are sick than are well, it becomes necessary to either have each individual put more into the pool (raise rates) or increase the size of the pool to include more healthy people who contribute more than they take out of the system. By increasing the pool from 10 to 100 people each paying the same $100, you then have $10,000 to work with for covering those 100 people. If a low enough percentage of the people need actual care, the pool makes money. If one person is taking up too much of the resources of the pool, it may be necessary to kick them out of the pool or risk taking the entire pool down or forcing the pool to raise the rate people are contributing.
What we have seen recently is people leaving the pool. Due to unemployment and loss of income many more people are without healthcare, many of which are the relatively healthy who pay into the pool more than they take out. This requires those that remain to pay more. Hence the rate hikes we’re seeing across the board. So how do we solve this problem? There are a number of different ways to do it.
1) Single payer. The actually socialist option. Not that socialism is necessarily a bad thing. In this model, everyone in the country is in the same massive pool. Because it requires healthy people to join the pool as well as the sick, individual costs go down. Since everyone has the same health coverage, you can go to any doctor in town and it will cost the same. Instead of the current medicare and medicaid payments being removed from your check each month, you’d have the government taking out your healthcare payment from your wages. Canada, England, and Germany all do healthcare this way and are quite happy with it overall. This is perhaps the most fair plan, but requires government management of the system and will cause hurt to the current health care companies.
2) Public Option. The not quite socialist option. In this plan, if the privately owned pools are not able to keep prices low enough to be affordable to the general populace, the government steps in sets up their own pool but without taking anything out for profits. The corporations hate this because many people will chose the public option, and they will lose customers. The Public Option must thread the needle of pools however because if they just admit the sick people, their pool will become unsustainable. By requiring the healthy to join they can make it more solvent but that requires a mandate that will be a bad deal for the healthy, forcing them to pay into a system and not getting any real benefit.
3) The current bill in congress. This does NOT (as of this writing) contain a public option, however it does require everyone to get health insurance in a similar way to the way we require all cars to be insured, with the exception that people can chose not to drive a car. This will force the young, healthy people who currently forgo health coverage into the pool in the hopes that this will lower costs overall. In the case of the poor who cannot afford the health coverage, it provides subsidies. It’s pretty much the same system as we have no except that nearly everyone will be required to buy health coverage or pay a fine. (Many people may opt for the fine since it may cost less than the health coverage they would be forced to get.) On the plus side, health insurance companies would no longer be able to kick people out of the pool.
4) The current system. The current system allows insurers to kick people out of the pool if they are too much of a drag on the system, costs more than other options, and leaves many people locked out in the cold. Insurers will not invite someone already sick to swim in their pool. Despite being quite unfair, it is an option. It just requires that we ignore the suffering of those who aren’t allowed in. It seems heartless (okay, it IS heartless) but the world is not fair and the have-nots will just have to deal. We have a couple public-pools but being eligible for memberships is not guaranteed (medicare and medicaid.)
5) The libertarian plan. Basically this involves getting rid of the public pools, medicare and medicaid, and letting everyone fend for themselves. While the left may call this akin to throwing the wounded to the sharks, it would save a lot of money and reduce the deficit by a ton as spending on Medicare and Medicaid currently makes up nearly 20% of government spending. (Factor in Social Security and it’s over 40%.) With this plan, those who can’t afford coverage will drop out of the pool, leaving less people to spread the risk, further increasing prices, causing more people to drop out.
6) My wishful thinking plan. Ban for-profit insurance companies and hospitals. Cut off the need for profit from hospitals and require anything they make in profits be invested back into the hospital to improve the quality of care. Insurance companies would be straight pools to balance risk amongst people to keep costs affordable. This will never happen and if it actually did, there would probably be a drop in quality based on smart people no longer going into the field since they will no longer be making obscene profits. On the other hand, maybe only those who are legitimately concerned with making people well would enter the field and it might just balance out. Oh, and make for-profit drug companies illegal too.
So which of these actual options (1-5) is best? That depends on the person. I would like the socialist single-payer plan provided it could be administered efficiently. Public option has some definite issues, although popular with progressives. The current bill is not socialist at all, but doesn’t really go far enough in either direction to make much of a difference. It’s better than nothing, but not anything to get excited (or worked up) over. Despite the right calling it communism, it’s pretty much middle of the road. The current system is broken, but still provides excellent service for those who can afford it. I can’t in good conscience support the current system or the libertarian plan since they would leave many, many people consigned to a level of care below what wealthy people donate to third world countries. Single-payer may be progressive totalitarianism, but I can’t see that being worse than the de facto anarchy we have now. This is one case where the center may not be the best location, although if I’d have to pick I’d say the health care legislation currently in congress is not far from it.
I’ve been having trouble writing for this blog for a while now because I live in a very conservative part of a blue state and pretty much everyone I regularly talk politics with is a conservative. This has lead to me having to explain the left side of things to them and generally play devil’s advocate for the left in most of my discussions. The more I do this, the more I worry that I am not truly in the center, where I have made it my mission to remain.
On top of that, it is increasingly difficult to find the center of America. I have argued that we are not a center-left country or a center-right country, that we are a center country, balanced mostly by strong feelings on the right and the left. I’m not sure if that is the case anymore. If we look back on history, it seems that today’s establishment left is to the right of Richard Nixon in a lot of areas. I’ve been thinking on this subject even more after reading this article describing the political spectrum not just in terms of conservative or progressive, but also in terms of freedom vs totalitarian. I think Mr. Ferris’ chart is off slightly, but it did get me thinking about my place in the political spectrum. I will therefor substitute my own chart for his.
It seems like the conversation in this country has, for as long as I’ve been alive, been relegated to the lower half of this chart. Conservatives talk about small government when they are out of power, but whenever they are in power, they grow it. I think that instead of having two sides in a political debate, there should be more like nine. Going from the chart, I’ll take them clockwise from upper left.
Libertarian Progressives, or as they are more commonly called, “Hippies” are those who believe the government should stop harshing their buzz, man. They are Utopian idealists who believe that the government should be unnecessary because we should all just get along.
Straight Libertarians believe the government is too big period. They don’t necessarily want to abolish government, just shrink it down to the point where it can’t interfere in their lives. A favorite of today’s youths and Ron Paul supporters, they generally get ignored by the “mainstream” press and marginalized by both right and left.
Conservative Libertarians are your typical Tea Party protesters. I think that makes them essentially conservative hippies. They want less government because they do not think government can or should solve people’s problems for them. Conservatives tend to become this when out of power.
Straight Conservatives are essentially your grandfather. They believe that the country was better off years ago and would like to return to a simpler time that may or may not have ever actually existed. Like your grandfather telling you about walking to school in the snow up-hill both ways, and this was somehow better than today, Conservatives want to return to an idealized Leave-It-To-Beaver 1950’s, just minus the turmoil and racism that was actually going on then.
Conservative Totalitarians, while saying that Government can’t do anything right in order to placate their libertarian brethren, believe that the government CAN do stuff right, mostly rounding up “illegals”, running a military capable of conquering the rest of the world on it’s own, monitoring the citizenry for signs of dissension via wiretapping. They’ll try to outlaw unseemly acts as they see fit. It’s basically your conservative grandfather with the added step of shaking the fist and saying, “There ought to be a law!” And then going out and making a law. At a lower setting, they’re the prohibitionists from the early 1900’s. At their worst they’re hyper-nationalistic, scapegoating, jack-booted thugs who will round up anyone who doesn’t fit with their vision of what a good citizen should be and throw them in the gas chamber.
Straight Totalitarians believe that government should be in complete control. This can be either magnanimous or sinister depending on the government. A typical monarchy would be one side and complete control by a despotic ruler on the other. It’s the belief that people should not be free to chose because when people are free they abuse their freedom in many harmful ways.
Progressive Totalitarians believe that they can use the power of government to make everything fair. At it’s worst it leads to the idea that if government controls everything, it can redistribute the wealth so everyone is equal, comrade! Of course, some are more equal than others. Like the hippies, this idea ignores human nature and those in power use that power to stay in power. At best, it results in government welfare programs that do a lot of good but leave a lot of people dependent on the government for their existence. At worst, it results in millions of people dying in Siberia.
Straight Progressives are in favor of moving the country forward to a glorious time of mutual cooperation that will likely never exist. Like the Conservatives they believe in an ideal, just based on the pie-in-the-sky future instead of an ephemeral past. They’re in favor of socialism, which is like communism lite, employer owned businesses, “fair” wages, healthcare for all. They’re constantly disappointed that humans just aren’t as fair minded and evolved as they hoped they’d be and that people aren’t inclined to change things, even given the promise that their untested theories will make things “Better.”
And now to the center. True Neutral. This is where I like to reside. The belief that big government or little government isn’t the issue, efficient, smart government is. The belief that the idealized past of the conservatives and the rosy future of the progressives are both stinking piles of BS. You have to take a view of history that includes both the good and the bad. Likewise the future is going to be somewhere between the Jetsons and a post-apocalyptic nightmare. I want government to stay out of people’s private lives and do their job of making things work, protecting the people from tainted meat, predatory financial institutions, and terrorists. I’ll gladly pay my taxes (well, maybe not gladly, but at least less grudgingly) if they’re actually going to make people’s lives better through roads, infrastructure, and yes even healthcare.
Looking back at politics in my lifetime, it seems that the argument has always been between the factions on the lower side of the board. Hippies and Tea Party protesters get laughed out of the room when it comes time to actually legislate. Between the tax and spend progressive totalitarians and the cut taxes but keep spending anyway conservative totalitarians, I don’t place my trust in any of them. I continue to believe that government can be a solution to our nation’s woes, but it should not be THE solution. I cannot place myself in any one of the eight outer camps. I must place myself in the center where I can pick and chose from the good things in each camp, and reject the bad ideas and divisive tendencies of each one. That is what I mean when I say I am a Centrist.
Any way I look at it, the Republicans are in trouble. Despite the Democrats’ best efforts to shoot themselves in the collective foot, the Republicans are looking worse. They seem to be off in some bizzaro world where facts and objective reality need not apply, egged on by the new faces of the Republican party Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh. But all is not lost. The Republicans can still come back from this but it will take something that has been anathema to them for close to three decades now: Change.
1) Look up the definition of “Bi-Partisan”. According to Webster’s: “Of, relating to, or involving members of two parties; specifically: marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties.” Now look at the definition of partisan: “A firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially: one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance.” Which one better describes the Republican Party today? There will always be disagreements between the parties, that’s why we have parties, but the two party system only works if both parties are working towards the same goal. In the past, both Democrats and Republicans were working to make America stronger and better, they just disagreed on what that meant and how to go about it. We need to return to those days. If the Democrats come up with a good idea, the Republicans should support it. By becoming the party of automatic “NO!” they become a party bereft of ideas, doomed to irrelevance. By becoming agreeable co-crafters of policy, compromising where necessary and engaging in vigorous debate where required, they become an active participant in government and can show the American people that they are not just a knee-jerk reactionary organization bent on regaining power at any cost regardless of what’s best for the country.
2) Make a plan. If the Republicans were to somehow regain power tomorrow, what would they do with it? Where would they take the country? I don’t know. That is a problem. The Republicans are hoping that by preventing Healthcare reform, they will have a repeat of Bill Clinton’s first term and be able to take back the house and the senate in 2010, but they forget that the Republicans during Clinton’s first term had actual ideas. They made a contract with America, most of which failed to pass but they at least had a vision of what America would be like should they retake control of the Government. While I’m sure some Republicans have a good idea of where they want to take the country, they will have to overcome the fact that Republicans had control of all three branches of government for 6 years under Bush, and it did not turn out well. It’s time to articulate a new plan with some objective facts to support it.
3) Admit when there’s a problem. If you ignore objective reality and pretend that everything is fine, it eventually shows through as being out of touch at best and fiddling while Rome burns at worst. Health-care in this country is becoming increasingly expensive, and is completely unavailble for many, many people. The goal should be fixing it, with arguments and debates over what is the best way to go about it. However, many Republicans believe that America has the best healthcare in the world and wonder why we should change it. And to be fair, the current system probably works perfectly fine for them. But it doesn’t work for everyone and if Republicans continue to ignore that fact and insist that everything is fine, there will be a further backlash against them. Likewise, the financial system catostrophically failed last year. Pretending that everything is fine and we don’t need regulation is going to cause further problems on down the line and further alienate the millions of voters affected by the collapse.
4) Be the Better Party. After seeing several Republican protestors displaying the President as Hitler, the argument always seems to be that “Well, the Democrats did it when Bush was in office.” As delightfully vindictive as that sentiment is, it doesn’t really get Republicans anywhere. It’s also about as mature as a 10 year old caught punching a fellow student saying, “He started it.” Be the constructive party. Let the angry protestors know that they’re not helping, distance yourselves from the crazies. Let your constituents know that the Republican Party is better than that.
5) Stick to your morals 100% or don’t have them. As the party of family values, it’s important to stick to your morals. If there’s one thing Americans can not stand, it’s hypocrisy. And watching the same people who came down so hard on Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal admit to affairs and affairs with prostitutes, the people who were so against homosexuals turn out to be the ones soliciting gay sex in airports or having illicit relationships with congressional pages makes it hard not to scream “Hypocrites!” If you want to be the party of values, you need to lead the call for the resignation of people who don’t live up to their own morals regardless of party. It’s better to lose a Senator or a Governor in the short-term than be forever tarnished as a party of hypocrites. Or you could abandon the artificial moral high-ground and become the party of human beings with problems like everyone else. Your choice.
6) Be the party of accountability. The Republican party is the party of personal liberty (Other than, you know, libertarians.) They believe that Government too often infringes on the rights of the people, and they call for smaller government and deregulation. As such, they should be on the forefront of calling for the arrest of people who abuse the system and of calling for stiff penalties for corporations who prove they cannot handle the freedom of deregulation. They should be more offended than anyone at abuses such as AIG, Enron, and the like. Being for freedom is all well and good, but laws exist because some people cannot handle freedom and choose to exploit the freedoms they’re given. It is that dichotomy that the Republicans must face.
7) Be the party of the people. Being pro-corporation is not neccessarily a bad thing, but corporations cannot vote and people can. People who have been screwed over by corporations tend to vote against people who act on the corporations behalf. So why are the Republicans so pro-business? Ostensibly, it’s due to the absolute truth that big companies create lots of jobs. Plentiful jobs means more people able to make it on their own without depending on a government handout. So really, Republicanism only really works when there is a strong middle class. Rich people are few. Poor people, if they vote, tend to vote for democrats. The middle class is the greatest potential for growing Republican voters. It makes sense then that the Republicans would be pro-business only in so far as it leads to job creation. If a company is laying off workers, the Republicans should be up in arms against that. If a company is closing up shop, the Republicans should be concerned. If, on the other hand, the Republicans are only concerned with allowing comapnies to increase their bottom line, the number of jobs in this country will continue to decrease (Nothing helps the bottom line than cutting costs via eliminating jobs) and the number of poor, unemployed, angry democrat voters will be created.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are many other things that need to be done as well, but these are a good start. Hopefully the Republicans will be able to impliment some well needed changes to thier platform and rise from irrelevance. Because we need a viable opposition to the Democrats. Allowing Democrats to push through their agenda unimpeeded will give us equal and opposite problems to what we got when the Republicans had control of our Government. And if, after the enevitable failure of those plans, the Republicans regain control without learning anything from this forray into the wilderness, heaven help us.
I normally try to keep my posts to a national scale, but permit me if you will to talk about a local issue. I live in Michigan, a state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation (by a massive margin of 3% over the 2nd worst.) Our state’s economy has traditionally been supported by the auto industry, but with the economic down-turn, car manufacture has slowed to a crawl, at least the car manufacturing that hadn’t already been shipped out of state or to Mexico. 15% of our population is unemployed including, yes, me. The ISP I had worked for for the past six years eliminated my job due to financial reasons. We are hurting as a state and no one seems to be taking any steps to solve the problem. But I have a dream.
With all the talk of green jobs being created, I wonder why can’t Michigan do that? We have massive manufacturing experience, and just as in World War I and II where we moved from making cars to making tanks and aircraft, why can’t we move from manufacturing cars to manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines? I would love to see Michigan become the leading manufacturer of those technologies as well as research into making them more efficient. On the west coast of Michigan, around the Holland area, we have a massive population of dutch people. Why don’t we tap into that heritage and build a wind-farm in Lake Michigan? Put it off shore within sight of the beaches and it would be a tourist draw. Especially if you arranged them artistically. If Lansing passed a law mandating that any turbines installed in Michigan be manufactured in Michigan and gave tax breaks to companies who moved their manufacturing base to Michigan we can get there. (The income tax on the newly employed would bring in way more money to the state than will be lost from the tax breaks you give to the companies, especially the new ones we bring to the state. It would certainly be better than the nothing we are getting from companies who are not creating jobs here currently.)
As well as wind power, we should also become a leader in Solar energy. Michigan is not known for it’s year-round sunshine (Michigan winters give rival Seattle a run for it’s money on the title of “The place where the sun don’t shine.”) but if we make them affordable enough via large-scale manufacturing (more jobs), we could see a majority of houses have them installed on their roofs. If we can make enough houses self-sufficient we could transform our energy companies from energy producers to energy brokers. If a house generates more electricity than they need, the rest goes back to the grid and that home owner gets a check at the end of the month. The energy company can turn around and sell that energy to businesses and homes with higher energy needs.
These are two simple ideas that could help get Michigan back on track. It would be a massive undertaking, and I’m not sure even where to start, but I’d like to see this become a reality. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions on how to make this a reality or if you have any other ideas on how to get Michigan back on track.
#1 Obama is not a fascist or a socialist and definitely not a fascist AND a socialist. Socialism is a radical left ideology and Fascism is a radical right ideology. Saying that Obama is a fascist is like calling George W Bush a Commie. Obama isn’t exactly a Socialist either. He’s firmly on the side of Capitalism. Ask any actual socialists.
#2 Admitting something has faults is not the same as condemning it. Capitalism is the best form of economics we humans have come up with, but that is not to say it is without fault. Without some restraints, it leads to unbridled greed and a great deal of harm to all involved. Since the foxes we put in charge of the hen-houses seem to be unable to restrain themselves, having some checks on the rampant greed displayed by corporations lately is not socialism, it’s trimming the sick branches of a tree so the good parts can flourish.
#3 Health Care reform is not socialism. All the health-care bills that are currently under scrutiny are is Health Insurance reform. In order to do socialized medicine right, the government would need to set up a single-payer system where you pay taxes and the government provides you health insurance. If done right, this system could work to provide better coverage for a far greater number of people than the current system (and slightly worse coverage for a select few) but single-payer is not even on the table in any of the bills put forth.
#4 A public option will kill private insurance companies. Just like UPS and FedEx are going out of business thanks to the USPS. (For those of you who don’t get sarcasm: that was it. The public option will be just that: an option.)
#5 The brown shirts will be showing up any minute now to silence dissent. I shouldn’t have to say this, but no. No they are not. Obama, unlike his predecessor, even allows dissenting opinions in his town hall meetings. He has taken ideas from both right and left. And despite the fact that yelling doesn’t help change anyones minds, no one has come forth to arrest protesters en masse and send them to jail for expressing their opinions.
Bonus: Having your own opinion is fine. Having your own facts is not. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, you’re welcome to join but we’re discussing things in the real world, not the alternate reality where Obama sports a goatee and is spreading his Socialist-Fascist-Communist-Nazi agenda. If you want to discuss bizzarro world, Glenn Beck is there for you.
The raging health-care debate going on in our nation’s capital is bringing to the fore another debate that has been simmering beneath the surface of our culture for years: Capitalism vs Socialism. Thanks to intrepid capitalists, socialism is considered a dirty word in American politics despite places like Sweden and France whose socialist health-care systems function quite well (at least when compared to the broad spectrum of American health-care for both insured and uninsured) A socialist health-care system in America might well work better for more people than the current system, but we will never have a socialist health-care system in America. What we will end up with, what congress will push through and the president will sign into law, is a compromised system that may succeed in lowering costs a bit, but will certainly not be universal and will no doubt be underfunded. And that is the unfortunate downfall of any attempt at socialism in America, in order for socialism to work, everyone must commit to it and agree to pay for it and that is just not possible in America today. Once again, California leads the way with their push for ever-increasing social programs while rejecting any attempt to raise taxes to pay for them.
But really, if the goal is to improve the affordability of health-care and increase the level of care patients receive, there are other options. Unfortunately, the majority of those options (the ones that don’t simply give the middle-finger to poor people) upset the sacred cows of capitalism: profits. But really, if the goal of a health-care system is anything other than making sick people well, it has lost it’s way. Our health-care system has the added goal of making money. This should scare you.
Ostensibly, an insurance company would take good care of clients so as to not get sued and to attract more clients. But what if your health became a liability to their bottom line? Suddenly, you have a preexisting condition and your insurance has gone bye-bye. In the war of priorities, your health has lost out to mega-insurance-corps’ profit margin. The problem with health care right now, as well as energy, prisons, and countless other institutions that we rely on is that we have allowed them to be run for profit.
Anyone remember RoboCop? In that movie, the city of Detroit has outsourced its police force to a huge corporation. It seems like a ridiculous idea except we’ve already done that with many of our prisons. And now we have the companies running said prisons lobbying for stiffer penalties, which is of course meant to keep us safe and has nothing to do with getting more money for having more clients (IE: prisoners.)
Socialized health-care would solve the profit problem but would create a large set of other problems (for instance, how to pay for it.) There is a solution closer to the center, however: The Non-Profit. It may be difficult, but imagine a non-profit insurance company. What would that look like? By buying in to a non-profit insurance plan, the insurance company pools the resources and insulates you from the cost of health-care should you need it. It’s what an insurance company is supposed to do, but because for-profit insurance companies must also look at the bottom-line they may refuse to allow you a needed procedure (or at least refuse to pay for it which is, for most people, the same thing.) The non-profit insurance company would be free of that secondary (or in many cases primary) obligation to make money for their investors, and would be free to offer the best level of care possible.
The majority of hospitals in America are non-profit. Any profits they make go straight back into the hospital to purchase the best equipment and to allow them to hire the best people available. Non-Profit organizations like the Mayo Clinic are world-renowned for their care. Why not have a non-profit insurance company working towards that same goal? The goal of making sick people well and keeping healthy people from getting sick?
The same principle can be applied to many other areas of our country. If profits are not the goal, companies can focus on treating their employees better which in turn leads to better service of customers. Better service of customers leads to more customers and higher profits. Ironically, the best way to make profits is to not worry about profits. We in America have completely lost this. Our corporations’ obsession with profit margins have lead them to take unnecessary risks, cut costs any way they can (usually from customer service and/or by lowering the quality of their products. See: GM and planned obsolescence for the later, AT&T and Comcast for the former), and to treat the customer like the enemy. Let’s face it, if you’re an insurance company with the goal of making money and someone makes a claim, they are directly interfering with your goal. Even if responding to that claim is the stated purpose of your company, you’re going to fight it as best you can and make the customer jump through as many hoops as possible to get anywhere.
We need our companies to stop looking at the bottom-line and start serving their customers. If profits get immediately put to use growing the company, most companies would benefit and investors would get more money in the long term. It’s a smaller slice of a much bigger pie. Would you rather have 2% of a million dollars or 50% of $30,000? Looking at the landscape of our economy the last couple years, it’s clear that companies have done far more harm to themselves and their reputations and their profit margins by seeking more and more profits than they would have even by taking a slight loss to better serve their customers, clients, and employees. Their stock prices over the last year certainly show it.
I was going to write a nice long post on the Republican response to the stimulus packaged, but I’ll let Rachel handle it:
Seriously? Tax cuts? How does that help people who are out of work and therefor have no money and therefor pay no taxes. And if we’re worried about inflation due to government conjuring money into existance, how is this any different than what banks do whenever they give someone a loan? (In case you weren’t aware, banks are only required to have $1 for every $9 they loan out, which means that when you get a loan, the bank is creating money out of the ether for you. If everyone paid off their debts, the American economy would shrink down to 1/9th it’s current size.)
Who knows if the stimulus package will work or not, but at least lets get some decent roads and bridges out of it. If the stimulus package fails at least we’ll have something to show for our money instead of the smoking craters in Iraq and Afghanistan that are all president Bush has to show for the trillion dollars we spent on those wars.
Now that the Democrats are in power, I really want to back the Republicans. Please Republicans, give me something, anything, to defend you with. Give me a decent alternative to the democrats plan! Give me a reason to support you.
