Posted on 10/10/2016 2:02:58 PM PDT by Nachum
That sounds like a good idea to me, but I admit I haven’t thought that through.
My issue is with the verbiage here. It is nearly completely incomprehensible. How on earth could any normal citizen make heads or tails out of it? The answer is, they can’t. I just focused specifically on reimbursement for imaging and it took me a while to focus on just two points I found.
In a bill that huge, I am certain there are tens of thousands of equally obscurely written points, each one with the built in capability to change dramatically some aspect of medicine.
It is the liberal propensity to micromanage to the nth degree everything because they are control freaks, and they think they are the smartest people in the room, if not the country, and likely, the world.
It is why they ABHOR the fabled “invisible hand” of a capitalistic free market. They want to control each and every button and lever that can be moved or manipulated to affect a system. They simply don’t understand that it can’t be done.
Thomas Sowell describes it brilliantly and understandably in his book “Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to The Economy”, when he explains how millions of people with money in their hands provide input of information into an economy, with the resulting votes cast by that money that moves levers in all the right directions without some dumb ass liberals in Washington DC trying to determine how much of any given resource with multiple uses should be allocated to a purpose.
It all just happens automatically and reliably. Not always nicely, as he points out, using beachfront property as an example. (It is so desirable that everyone wants it, but there is a limited supply, so prices determine to what use that beachfront property is put. Liberals would think that is unfair, and make owning of beachfront property a “right” (with obvious results)
Anyway, I got off subject. Point is, liberals have to control every little aspect of everything, and as the Soviet Union and every other socialist endeavor (with the current iteration of that lesson in Venezuela) demonstrates, it cannot be done. It is doomed to failure.
Exactly, that is a great point you make.
It is why the diminishment of states rights under the federal steamroller is a bad and undesirable thing.
Take federally mandated common core. Education should be run by the local town and city governments. If they do poorly, it is a black mark on that locale and people will avoid it, the faulty system will diminish and fail as parents bring their children to better places.
But when the federal government mandates a one-size-fits-all approach, and IT fails, our entire country goes down the tubes.
And there are thousands of principles in many aspects of our lives apart from education that fit that model.
It would allow experimentation, and make diversity a good word. (Although I believe the word is so corrupted now as to be beyond redemption.)
By the way, it isn’t the strongest point (in my opinion) to argue whether resources should be allocated to healthcare, education, highways, or anything else in this proportion or that.
I think exercising the local approach you describe would provide in each case the most efficient and productive allocation of resources in its own domain, and people/governments could make informed choices about proportioning money to each as political choices, not out of an emergent, ad-hoc need, which is what we do now as things fail.
Jonathan Gruber and MIT are an embarrassment.
He blamed it on the voters? I remember that it was pretty much crammed down our throats whether we wanted it or not. 2000+ pages and nobody read it. That was congress’s fault.
And that was a democrat controlled congress, I want to add. Not one republican voted for it.
The Feds usurp state tax sources, then block grant (thanks to Nixon). Inevitably strings are attached to Block grants. We like the Hyde amendment strings. The left likes other strings. Mostly strings come from Rent-Seekers such that certain industries and companies are favored over competition, especially emerging competition.
Solution:
Eliminate all Fed Transportation, energy, ATF, Luxury and Sin taxes in 5 years. Tell collectors of the taxes (eg oil, liquor, tobacco companies) to directly pay the state in which the tax is collected.
Eliminate all Fed spending on transportation, energy, ATF, etc. The states have 5 years to replace (or not) the Fed taxes. This de-centralizes government power significantly.
Too often big new programs are opposed by a majority of congress. But then new highways and other carrots and sticks buy the votes of congressmen opposed to what they vote for.
Eliminated are many of the omnibus atrocities.
Right on. I have been beating this drum for years...Federal Highway Funds are a giant lever the Federal Government uses to make states knuckle under...
Sure, they say, you can do things any way you like, you still have that right as a state, but...if you don’t meet our requirements, you don’t get any highway funds...or education funds...or...you name it.
Some “state’s rights”.
If Trump-Ryan-McConnell could agree on truly decentralizing the Fed level it would cut their personal power. But it would greatly benefit small government politicians in the future.
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