Solutions, Solutions, Solutions Part One: Health Care

Often the fbomber is accused of being nothing more than a kvetcher, a whiner, a complainer, and criticizer. “What’s your solution?” these people kvetch, whine, complain and criticize. “It’s easy to put people down, but what’s your alternative?”

To shut these people up, the fbomber will offer his solutions for the thorny problems which beset our fair nation. Solutions which, as you all will see, are about as simple and elegant as one would expect solutions formed without any training or familiarity with the subject matter.

Issue One: Health Care.
If one listened to the whining and puffing about the whole health care issue, you might be led to believe that is a diabolically complex tangle. One which many Democrats believes requires an equally diabolically complex solution, one that might take the form of a 2,500 page book of laws specifying what insurance companies can and can’t and must do. Or --- as many Republicans might say --- one that is so diabolically complex that no government could ever possibly hope to solve it, so why even bother?

That’s why the fbomber doesn’t listen to these assholes. The fbomber simply works on two simple assumptions.

ASSUMPTION ONE
Most of the time, the free-market capitalist system works better than a government-provided alternative. If you want something produced and distributed more cheaply, more abundantly, with better quality and greater efficiency ---- put the self-interested efforts of profit-seeking autonomous economic actors on the job.

For that reason, most of our health reform efforts should go into turning our health care and insurance market into something more like a free market. Which, let’s be honest, it is nothing like now. Let companies operate across state lines, break up oligopolies, create simple, fair, lenient “rules of the road” for everyone to follow and stay the fuck out of the way.

Don’t micromanage what insurance companies and hospitals and doctors can and can’t do. Don’t create administrative layers and bureaucratic impediments and operational uncertainty. Let the insurance companies and hospitals and doctors and patients work it out amongst themselves. As long as there isn’t any fraud, or deception, or trying to game or manipulate the system, the government can let the free market work.

Solution, Part One: Open the health care & insurance market to true competition.

ASSUMPTION TWO
Some of the time, the free-market capitalist system does not work better than a government-provided alternative. I would not want to hand over construction of this nation’s infrastructure, judicial system, law enforcement, defense, or education over to the purely self-interested, profit-seeking economic actors. That’s because, for all its ability to create abundantly, the free market does a piss-poor job of distributing equitably.

It appears that health care is one of those things that we need spread around a little bit more evenly than the profit motive encourages. Not only for reasons of fairness and social justice, but for economic and public safety reasons.

So there needs to be another option, for those who the newly thriving, private free-market system does not serve. A public option. Operating alongside the private options --- like public and private schools, like the post office and FedEx, like security guards and cops. Competing with one another, and spurring one another to perform better.

Like the public schools, post office and cops, this public option would offer basic, competent, simple services. For those who could afford to pay their way, appropriate fees would be charged for these services. For those who truly couldn’t, society would pick up the tab for them. Why? Because that is what countries that aren’t shitholes do, that’s why.

Solution, Part Two: Create a quality, affordable public option for those unserved by the free market.

Health Care solved. What was so hard about that?