I Want Free Health Care, But I Don't Want to Pay For It, and Other Pearls of Wisdom

With the news today coming out that the most recent Gallup poll stunningly uncovered the fact that Americans want the best health care but don't want to pay for it, came shock and disbelief albeit only from people that were stranded on a desert.

"The poll of 3,026 adults, surveyed Friday through Sunday, has a margin of error of +/-2 percentage points. Some questions, asked of half the sample, have an error margin of +/-3 points. By 56%-33%, those surveyed endorse the idea of enacting major health care changes this year. Just one in four say it's not important to them. When it comes to financing the costs, six of 10 favor the idea of requiring employers to provide health insurance for their workers or pay a fee instead." from the USA Today Gallup poll.

The fact that this survey was actually paid for by a public company was more shocking to me," said Captain Obvious of I knew it, Florida. Perhaps the greatest idea came from the Gallup poll writers themselves when they decided to go home for the day and stop asking silly questions.

While considering my abnormal viewpoints with a colleague recently, I was reminded of a terrific book I read called the "Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein, a truly thought provoking book, quite the opposite of a Gallup poll. Her book is based on historical facts and statistics that were used by the Chicago School of Economics to shock nations into globalization. This allowed US companies to go into these poor, often battered companies and buy everything from the workers to their public utilities. The reason why many of these countries were so poor was because they were often "spoiled" by social programs they couldn't afford. The IMF and the large corporations would then only loan money to remake the countries if the politicians would agree to open up global trade (which allowed the international companies to go in and buy everything that was attached) and repeal any and all social programs. Largely, these countries of course suffered immensely worse then before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had gone into the countries and after 5-10 years the local currency etc. would start to gain traction and the economy were modernized into a model of capitalism.

The parallel between these countries (mostly Latin American and Middle Eastern) and our country today is that we are on the precipice of a truly awful economic decline and polls like the one by Gallup confirm that we as Americans want everything but won't sacrifice anything to get it. Of course the politicians will still promise and deliver these programs to us without regard to cost or anything else as long as they are elected time and again. And the ugly truth of the book (which is pointedly liberal) is that we going to need to be shocked out of these habits in order to "reset" the economy. All social programs and anything else that causes deficits and debt will have to be abandoned and then started all over again.

As the most productive nation on earth, this future can certainly be avoided by making good decisions like Universal Health Care but cuts will have to be made elsewhere! But just like after all the recessions that Greenspan avoided by messing with the interest rates (which is causing a larger, more impending crash which will combine all the past recessions as bills from these prior mistakes have never been absorbed, just deferred) and like we are doing again, now by avoiding the current recession and spending money that just doesn't even exist, this final bill is going to come due. And it is coming due. And when other countries wake up and stop financing our debts, as they wake up to the notion that is impossible for us to pay them back. When? I have no idea. But the first part of it is happening already as the dollar continues to decline and China is slowing its ridiculous purchase of our treasuries. I am willing to give up my cushy health insurance brokerage for the good of this country and if we all do something painful it can help defray some of the pain that is coming, what are you willing to do?

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