For those who have not yet heard the news via Belmont’s main website, the Commission on Presidential Debates has chosen Belmont University to host the Town Hall Presidential Debate on October 7, 2008.
Nope, I didn’t stutter, and that is what you think it is. We’re hosting a presidential debate! I suppose the advantage of a blog in this context is to provide the immediate reaction, rather than calm and reasoned reflection. And I have to tell you, this news has sent a tremor through campus. I’m not sure how we compare to previous sites in terms of campus population, etc., but I have to imagine this represents quite a coup for our administration. I know it represents one heck of an opportunity for fostering political debate on campus–among students, not just among candidates. Actually, probably more the former than the latter; when’s the last time a debate actually featured debating?
At any rate, we are all extremely excited, and we can’t wait to find out how we will be allowed to participate! Expect to hear more here!
Let Free Markets Fix Healthcare
An alumnus of Belmont’s MBA program, entrepreneur Charles Hagood, provides lean management consulting for the healthcare industry through his company Healthcare Performance Partners. While currently working in Denmark he wrote this at his blog site:
…I can’t help but note that the majority of healthcare issues for the most part will not be solved via socialized medicine and certainly not with the government getting more involved to “help us”. The answer is to eliminate waste, reduce unevenness, and reduce overburden.
Amen.
We are now facing a false choice in the US. One choice is to continue the current system of rent seeking by the healthcare industry. K Street in Washington, DC is awash with lobbyists and their money funded by various healthcare and corporate interests. The healthcare mess we now have is the outcome of decades of duplicitous acts between large public corporations, various healthcare interest groups, and politicians. Through a labyrinth of tax and employment laws we have created over the years an incredibly inefficient system that has pushed costs up at a pace that far exceeds any normal inflationary increases.
As an alternative, the other choice we are being presented with is the socialized model, which has gained tremendous steam of late thanks to the left and the mainstream media. If you want to see where complete government control of healthcare takes us, just ask Canada, or Great Britain, or any of the long list of socialist democracies that have taken that path. Not only are their systems inefficient, but theirs are also increasingly ineffective.
The third choice is to let the free market once again drive healthcare. Sadly, this alternative is getting precious little attention right now. We live in an age where the Republicans are taking us on a gentle stroll to socialism, while the Democrats offer the alternative of a full speed sprint.
If we put the “free” back into health care markets, we will see a system that will seek out improved outcomes through more efficient means. That is what free markets demand. How do we do this?
The first step is to uncouple health insurance from the tax code. This will take employers out of the loop. Health care is not a gift from our employers. It is part of what they pay us. By enmeshing healthcare in the tax code and employment law all we get is more bureaucracy and waste within American business and within our government. We have suckered Americans into believing that the market will take those dollars away if the government does not enforce the current system. The truth is that free markets will pay us the same. But now more of the dollars will come directly to us and not be redistributed through the human resource systems of corporations, to the bloated bureaucracy of health insurance companies, all under the watchful eye of our government. That is where much of healthcare money gets wasted.
We also need to deregulate health insurance. Let market forces work. We will see a return to the system we had 40 years ago where we had high deductible plans that covered only “major medical” events. We will have more income to pay for routine healthcare ourselves, which will guide that industry to more efficient and more effective outcomes through market pressures.
In short, get healthcare out of the tax code and employment law, and get government out of micro-managing health insurance. This is a simple prescription, but one that no politicians seem to have the courage nor vision to support.
Another shameless plug . . . !
I’m sure we all can relate to the enjoyment associated with the sharing of good news . . . the following is some good news I received this morning via email:
Hi,
We recently published “Hidden Gems: The 100 .edu sites every Entrepreneur Should Read ” I am happy to let you know that your site has been included in the list.
I figured I’d bring it to your attention in case you think your readers would find it useful.
Cheers,
Rich McIver
Of Calgon and Candidates (or, Peter Pan, Part II)
Transitional wry observation: how ironic that an insurance company, a business which we pay to assume risk on our behalf, should call itself Progressive…
Most Halloween costumes are not scary precisely because they are obviously that: costumes. This is so not because the costumes are poorly executed, but because they disguise us as things which, for the most part, we cannot be. They scare children because children (and postmoderns) still exist in the magical marches between imagination and reality, where imagined things become real simply in the imagining.
Progressives are frightening because they actually exist. Not only exist, but like Canadians, they walk among us undetected. Or maybe I should say that we walk among them.
Mere Liberty
Hi, I’m Ben. I’m a junior political science and philosophy double major and I love freedom, and figured this blog would be just one more way to express that love, so I’ll be posting on here every so often. I hope you will not only read, but comment. I’d love to take the issues I raise on here further.
So, what do I mean by saying I love freedom? I’m guessing my saying that probably either intrigues you or scares you. Why do I want freedom so bad? I’m probably sick and tired of the stupid government getting all up in my face and violating my rights, right? WRONG.
My call for freedom stems not from a demand for my rights as one who is governed, but from an acknowledgement of the limits of my rights as one who governs.
Or, for another way of looking at it:
I’m not your daddy. God is.
Of Peter Pan and Progressives
I’ve decided what I’m going to be for Halloween: a Progressive! I’ll scare…well, I probably won’t scare anyone. In fact, it would probably help me blend in a great deal more than I usually do. For Halloween purposes, I’d do better going as myself, at least if your average college student will be there. Oh, no! It’s a professor who expects me to think for myself! To earn grades! RUN!
I’ll have to save the ruminations on these kids today, and on how inflation does the same thing for self-esteem and grades that it does for currency (and the difference between inflation and appreciation) for another day. Makes me feel like I ought to be wearing my pants up around my armpits, and I just don’t feel up to the concomitant wedgie right now.
The point is, Progressives ought to scare us a great deal more than they do.
Market Misperceptions
We’ve all heard about “the market” doing this to people, doing that to people, getting pulled over for DUI…oh, wait, that was Paris Hilton. But I labor under the impression that most folk don’t have a good conception of the fact that “the market” is shorthand for a much more complicated idea. For example, most people think the market rewards those with money. In fact, the market defines what a good decision is, and then rewards those who make good decisions.
Let’s look at baseball for an example. The eight cities whose teams are in the playoffs this year, five are ranked in the top six in population: New York (1), Los Angeles (2), Chicago (3), Philadelphia (5), and Phoenix (6). The other three, however are much lower in the rankings (close to or even below our beloved Nashville at 28): Boston (24), Denver (25), and Cleveland (39).
The Folly of the “Fat-Tax” Design
It has become nothing short of a maxim that when given a choice between higher and lower taxes, people will undoubtedly choose lower taxes, and that lower taxes foster greater investment. After all, most of us purport to be rational thinkers who seek to maximize our own personal wealth! Yet I’m quite sure that virtually anyone who has paid taxes can resonate with the notion that there are many follies within the current tax code, even if they are not formally trained a tax accountant. “What were they thinking?” . . . many of us ask as we seek to finish up those forms at an otherwise beautiful time of year!
We Got Noticed!
CurrencyTrader.net listed our fledgling blog in their top 100 Academic blogs. Go team!
Rational Elitism (or, Of Democratic Deficits, Part III)
When last we saw our intrepid heroes, the approaching wave of baby-boomers was threatening to overwhelm OASDI, and hard-working Polish farmers had the CAP at the point of several rusty pitchforks (oh, the tetanus!). What strikes me in the comparison of the two is the response to the crisis in each. Certainly, the fatal flaws in these programs have existed from their inception (since they lie in that very inception). Both, however, have recently faced the need for reform from an impending, irresistible, and disastrous increase in cost. But reform has occurred in only one of these cases.