I haven’t been watching the health care shenanigans on Capitol Hill (and around the country) with any assiduity. It’s too depressing. Also, I don’t own a TV, which is a nice way of filtering out the noise.
Personally, I’m strongly in favor of a single-payer Canadian or European plan. But I have reluctantly concluded that what is belched forth by Congress as a result of all this hoo-ha is likely to be no better than what we have now, and very possibly worse.
Our ostensible leaders do not know how to lead, or are blocked when they try. The system is broke, and Washington ain’t gonna be able to fix it, because Washington is what’s broke.
My prescriptions for how things ought to be are diametrically opposed to the prescriptions offered up by “conservative” knuckle-draggers, but my observations of the deficiencies of the present system may be similar to theirs. We all feel a profound sense of frustration.
Here in California, the busy bureaucrats in Sacramento are powerless to balance the budget, so they’re slicing the educational system to ribbons. Never mind that producing an entire generation of poorly educated or uneducated citizens will eat holes in the tax base and make the problem worse — nobody in Sacramento is thinking that far ahead.
A considerable slice of the blame for the budget impasse lies at the feet of the prison guards’ union, which has ruthlessly championed harsher sentences and the building of more prisons. Cutting the prison population to 1/3 of its present level doesn’t seem to be something our legislators are able to contemplate, and it’s not hard to see why: Voters are filled with fear, and it’s easier to focus your fear on criminals running loose than to look at the root causes of the mess. Because who knows what to do about the root causes?
Every year, moving to Denmark seems like a better idea. I’d have to learn to speak Danish, and I guess the climate is a little crisp. But hey, I’m a smart guy, learning a language shouldn’t be a problem. And I can buy a warm coat.
Just don’t y’all follow me, okay?
Jim Aikin's Oblong Blob 
What I find remarkable is all the talk that under any govermental plan, we will be rationing health care. We’re rationing health care now — it’s a scarce resource and not everyone can have it. But now, we ration health care strictly on the basis of whether the patient has money.
What they mean when they say we will be rationing health care is, we’ll start rationing health care on medical grounds rather than financial ones. And this is frightening to some.
Conrad.