Wait – “third rail”?

I am reminded of the rather execrable movie “Disclose” (1994) starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. Which does however contain a very significant lesson. If you recall the “problem” is when Meredith (Moore) sues Tom (Douglas) for sexual harassment. Meanwhile there are production problems with hard drives coming from a new factory in Thailand. Tom of course destroys Meredith’s accusation. But Tom still gets anonymous messages about “you haven’t solved the problem”. What problem? The problem with the hard drives silly! He focused so much on the harassment charge that he still hasn’t solved the *real* problem – which he then does.

I have always thought that was a shining jewel of a lesson in an otherwise forgettable piece of dreck.

What I hear you saying in a sense is the Republicans need to wake up and “solve the (real) problem”.

For what it’s worth NPR has been running a series of report on the health care debate and had one show in which they explained how/why MRIs are so much cheaper in Japan than in America. Their conclusion (or should we say “argument”) was “the government said that they can only cost so much – and no more”. Propaganda? Probably. But does make one wonder. Do not misunderstand – I still believe in the market.

What concerns me is that Republicans and Conservatives are setting themselves up for a huge and longterm failure on this issue. THE issues here is the cost of healthcare, not the availability of health insurance. As all real conservatives know, cost is a function of supply and demand (I throw up in my mouth a little when I hear a particular Nobel prize winning politician and a particular Nobel prize winning economist talk about “bending the cost curve down” as though it were something that we could do if we just squeezed our triceps hard enough). We (conservatives) at least talk as though we believe that since nothing, on earth, is in infinite supply, the best means of distribution is via a market as unencumbered by gov’t regulation as possible.

As it stands, a significant portion of this supply has been artificially removed from the market by the Medicare programs and for Medicaid and Medicaid type programs. In other words, a big chunk of supply is now being taken up by folks who either end up receiving more of the supply than they’ve paid for or by folks who’ve paid little to nothing for the supply.

If folks on the right and in the center are successful in stopping the folks on the left from expanding this already unsustainable situation to include folks who could afford some supply, then what? We’ll still have the problem of healthcare costs increasing faster than any measure of inflation. And what few folks on the right seem willing to discuss is the fact that in order to impact the cost curve, we’re going to have make significant changes to how much of the supply is taken up by those elderly who haven’t paid for it.

I’m not opposed to taking care of our elderly. What I’m opposed to is treating any area of healthcare as a third rail.