Reasonable libertarians?

Yes, health insurance in this country has a curious past. The upshot is that people are chained to their jobs because to leave them is to be without healthcare except maybe at a very high cost.

ow long were you in the hospital in 2008? $20,000 sounds awfully cheap, seems like you couldn’t have been in there longer than a couple days at that cost, and without insurance I think the hospital would have wanted to give you the boot as soon as possible. Would your insurance premium have been like $800/month to have saved $20,000 in two years? Sounds kind of high.

But yes, if you have the money and can pay cash you are better off doing that than paying insurance. I believe a lot of the big companies just paid their employee’s bills rather than buy them policies. Look at all those big fancy insurance buildings all over the country, that’s from the slice they get everytime you visit the doctor. They also spend a healthy portion of their take on lobbyists who pay politicians to make sure there is no way we will ever get a single payer and toss them into the dustbin of history.

I just heard the word ‘single payer,’ this morning from NPR as I was stepping into the shower, not exactly sure of the context, but I believe it was that Obama wanted the process to be gradual and that’s one reason he let ‘single payer’ go by the by. I don’t know about that, I think he went with what he thought he could get past congress.

I guess of your two plans, I would prefer the former. Putting a fixed price on a procedure seems like the road to corruption because how do you decide on what that cost is, there are so many factors. But maybe you need something like that so that all your doctors don’t leave the country, but then where do they go? Maybe they form international corporations in places like Qatar and the Cayman Islands.

“There has been some talk,” that’s what the Opus Dei farmer who lives next door to my Indianapolis friends, said, stepping in for a beer after, I dunno, slopping the hogs or whatever those guys do, “that this whole Obamacare mess is on purpose so that the people will get distracted, and before they know what is going on, we will have socialized medicine.”

One wonders where he heard this talk, was it something the hogs said while he was slopping them? It’s kind of a right wing trope where they quote these things which have no basis in fact, and they never tell where they heard them, because basically they are just making them up, and want to give them some credence by saying, “There has been some talk.”

But anyway I said, “I certainly hope so,” even though I don’t believe anybody ever deliberately fails at something just to get some other desired effect, because it would be nice. Would be nice if people started talking about socialized medicine, and looked at the Obamacare mess, and looked at the even bigger mess of the system that proceeded it, and decided to chuck it all, and do like everybody else in the civilized world has done. It would be nice.

Chris Christie breezed through all the Sunday shows two days ago. Didn’t have much to say, avoided taking a position on anything controversial, all he wanted to do was talk about his big winning percentage, and his good numbers with women and minorities, and maybe, just maybe, to drop a little hankie in front of the deciders of the Republican nomination in 2016.

Put a little fear in me I tell you, at this point in time he looks a bit formidable, but then I thought of the primary of 2012 with Mitt and the Seven Dwarfs, and I realized there was no way he was getting through the Republican primary. But what if the Republicans changed? Doesn’t seem likely, doesn’t seem like it’s in their nature.

What if the libertarians broke from the bible thumpers and the cranks, and stood by the process of reason they claim to love so well, and were amenable to talking about the world the way it is, and not the way they thought it should be? What if they were willing to compromise to get something they want, would that be possible?