Missing the Point on Health Care Reform

The government doesn't know how to do anything well, goes the conventional wisdom. Just look at the DMV and the Post Office and government housing and so on and so forth. Because the government is fundamentally incompetent, we shouldn't allow them to run health care.

What if all of that was wrong? What if the government was tremendously competent? Would that change the whole conversation? Would it be OK to hand health care over to them then?

No.

The problem isn't whether or not they'd manage to get the cap off the child-proof bottles and hand us our blue pills, the problem is that we can't pay for them in the first place. We're $2T in the red this year. Even if government health care allowed the lame to walk and the blind to see, it would still be a bad idea. The problem isn't health care, it's the concept that we can create more entitlements when we can't pay for the ones we have. Until the concept of buying entitlements on credit changes, we'll keep facing new ones. It will be a government spending whack-a-mole game.

We managed to defeat health care and pre-K education, but prescription drug benefits and cash-for-clunkers got through.