There are people who just don't "get it". Things that are as obvious as the nose on one's face are treated as strange, fanciful notions by some elements of society. However, what it is that is to be "gotten" is a cultural norm. The accepted facts in one culture are hysterical lunacy in another. The nut-ball fringe here is the institutionalized orthodoxy elsewhere and vice versa. The trick is figuring out whether what you take for granted is sound, reasonable thinking or just plain stupid.
In my last post, I was attempting to approach this conundrum by briefly cataloging some of the less popular ideas about which I have had enough evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, to convince me that they are true. It was a foregone conclusion that many of my assertions would be met with derision and that I would be lambasted for not supporting my contentions with supporting documentation. These criticisms were valid and I don't contest them. What I didn't get around to explaining was that I, just like everyone else, don't need an airtight, deterministic proof for everything I accept as true. I just need enough information from sources I trust to, in the aggregate, have a reasonable level of confidence in the contention.
The particular things I personally believe and don't believe are not as important as the idea that some of our most basically held beliefs are totally fallacious and that some of the foreign ideas we so cavalierly pooh-pooh and dismiss out of hand are spot on.
Here are a few notions to ponder. Some of these you may think are unquestionably true, and others might seem totally ridiculous, depending on your cultural bias. Bear in mind that large numbers of people in the world are on each side of these issues.
Creation science should be taught in schools, and given an equal hearing with the flawed theory of evolution. I'll start with this to show how stupid a lot of people are in this country. There are several school districts where this is the official policy. The kids there hear this moronic claptrap, the pseudo-scientific denial of the irrefutable proof of the evolution of species over millions of years, and are forced to waste valuable time in class pondering whether or not to accept what is obvious. Students in other countries, where reasonable people are in charge of education at the national level, accept evolution as a first premise. They realize, because they are taught so, that any other notion is just stupid. Thinking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin was a serious issue in the Middle Ages, but is now rightly seen as pointless contention on an absurd premise. It's time that we dismiss "creation science" as equivalent drivel.
Today, some Americans still think that the jury is out on evolution. They just don't get it, do they? I know they're stupid, and you probably think they're stupid and wrong too. You're reading stuff on the internet rather than agonizing over The Bachelor, so it's not likely that you're a brain-dead, fundamentalist throwback to a previous century. If you can "get" evolution, then you have some chance of "getting" some other things that you may have thought differently about before. But, if you know that the Earth is only 6,000 or so years old, you had best quit now. There's no hope for you. I can't help you.
Still with me? Good. Let's press on to something more substantial. I've been surprised at how many otherwise well-informed people buy the propaganda that our nation is intrinsically better than other nations. This idea gets extended into a lot of wrong-headed thinking like this whopper.
The United States of America has the highest standard of living and best quality of life of any country in the world. I haven't believed this at all for 35 years, ever since I returned from several years in Europe, but an amazing number of people here still think this is the case. Generally, they are uneducated, lower income people who have not traveled much, if at all. Once you have spent some time in any developed country, notably the European social democracies, it becomes obvious that they have it pretty nice. When you pile on the statistics about life expectancy, low crime rates, free health care and education, literacy and the fully implemented, comprehensive social infrastructure, you have to consider the possibility that life here isn't even particularly good here. It's clearly better elsewhere. Of course it's not better everywhere else, but we still ought to take a few hints from those nations where they are doing a better job of handling things than we are. There are lots of places in the world where you can walk around at night safely, there are no homeless people, no one starves, and everyone gets all the medical care they could reasonably need without paying anything out of pocket. Some places have free education, too, all the way through your post-doctorate work, and you get a stipend to live on as long as you can do well enough to keep attending classes. Do we have that? Nope. What makes us so special?
Warning: This kind of talk can get you into a fistfight in a bar if you don't pay homage to chauvinistic flag-waving with the litany, "America is the greatest country in the world." I've come pretty close a number of times when I stuck to my guns and didn't back down. My adversary in these encounters is invariably a working class blowhard who has never heard anything else his entire life, and despite the horrible things that have happened to him in the course of that tawdry, deprived existence, doggedly clings to his particular version of the American dream. When I shut up to hear why exactly he thinks as he does, I always hear the same tired catechism of anecdotal tales of achievement and opportunity, totally unsupported by any direct personal experience. He isn't rich or successful, and he doesn't earn a lot of money because he never went to college and has no marketable skills. He could not have afforded to attend college without educational benefits from his military service, but he used those to attend truck-driving school instead. He has no medical coverage because it's prohibitively expensive for a non-union, independent trucker. He can't afford to own a home and his ex-wife and children live in poverty in another city where she, also uneducated and stolidly working class, barely gets by on her tiny wages from her part-time (i.e., no benefits) job at WalMart or Target and the intermittent, partial child support payments from the fulminating jackass bellowing at me on the other side of the table.
I know he's stupid and completely wrong about everything he says because I've had a completely different life experience. It doesn't matter in the slightest that he's full of it and that I'm being much more realistic. In the prevailing ethos of the bar, I'm the unpatriotic crank, and he's the good American. In fact, twice, I've only managed to avoid being dragged outside and beaten to a pulp by citing my honorable military service during the Vietnam War. One of these incipient assailants shook my hand and thanked me for my patriotic service, then bought me a beer, during my consumption of which he expressed incredulous amazement that a commie pinko such as I had been in the military. You can't reason with these guys; all you can do is stop arguing. I didn't explain how grossly insulting it was for him to assume that I hadn't served just because I don't share his chauvinistic delusions.
I don't want the federal government screwing up my life. Oh, good grief. How much longer do we have to endure this silliness? Social regressives have been spouting this claptrap since the Revolution, and yes, I mean the one in 1776. They are just cheap and don't want to pay anything at all for anyone else's benefit. They will take all the federal money they can for their own greed, such as war profiteering, agricultural and oil subsidies, and now, financial bailouts, but not a penny for the old, the sick the young, or for highways or bridges or anything else we all need. The Reaganite contention that government is the problem has become so solidly ingrained in the popular mythology that you can't even discuss most issues without running into the brick wall of this moronic dogma.
All arguments against full funding and control of medical care and education are based on accepting the premise that the government does things less efficiently that "the market". They cite the straw man of "the miracle of capitalism" to position an adversary in the role of defending socialism. It's usually an insurmountable disadvantage in debate to start there. Once you're the "commie" and they're the "capitalist", you're screwed and can't win any argument. Instead of falling into that trap, you must undermine that unsupported notion that free enterprise in the form of individuals madly scrambling to make a buck will always deliver better value than an organ of society, working in the aggregate, to deliver goods and services to the people. It's a tall order, but it's possible if you carefully lay the groundwork of explaining how some things, like national defense, transportation (well, at least highways and bridges), fire protection and police, can only be provided effectively by government. You can get even the dumbest person to agree with that. Start there and expand the argument.
Recently, we've seen what unregulated markets gone amok can do. This allows getting a little traction on the idea that the federal government has to regulate finance and trade to make sure that clever thieves don't steal everything. Do you fully appreciate what has happened? If the value of stocks has fallen by half of what it was at its height, then the wealth supposedly created by these daring, capitalist risk-takers was all fake. It was a bubble of worthless, recirculated commercial paper and arcane derivative instruments and it's all collapsed. Where did it all go? If there was value attributed, in the form of the price of equity, that is, publicly-traded stock, then someone paid money for it. If it's gone now, that means someone stole it! The theft of investment capital by misrepresenting assets is no different than a mugger holding a gun to your head and cleaning out your wallet. Why are we talking about rescuing our financial institutions? Well, it's arguable that the thieves still think they can steal some more before they are shut down.
This could only happen because the government was restrained from putting an end to it. When the professionals with the sharp pencils and green eye shades at the SEC and other agencies spotted Ponzi schemes and questioned the viability of debt default buy-back derivatives on sub-prime mortgage packages years ago, they were told to back off by the political appointee Wall Street cronies installed as their overlords. The idea of government experts knowing better than some bumpkin at a brokerage house doesn't sound so ludicrous now, does it?
If the government had been allowed to perform its rightful function, there would have been no market collapse. This is the opposite side of the issue, expressed as an alternate view to those who expect you to accept their delusional axiom that government can do no good and that unbridled capitalism can do no wrong. A few months ago, if you were to claim that a crippling collapse of the market and catastrophic failure of financial institutions was inevitable unless the government intervened, you would have been hooted down as a socialist Chicken Little. Now, it's a tenable contention, isn't it?
Health care and education are not like fire protection and highways; they would both be better if left to private enterprise. Oh? What evidence is there to support that contention? None! Indeed, we have both models going and both cases prove that government would do a better job.
The issue of education is a lot simpler than the critics of public education would have you believe. Mandatory public education is far superior to a totally private system in the same place. That's just a fact. When the segregationists in Prince George County, Virginia, didn't want to integrate their high school, they just closed it. It took years before the courts forced the local government to provide public schools for all its children. Until then, most of the poor, predominantly African-Americans, could not afford tuition at the segregated private schools set up, so they got no education at all. That was it. You got as much as your parents could afford, and no more. That's no good, is it?
On the flip side, look at places where the norm is to attend fully-funded public schools. Here, in the Puget Sound region of Washington, we have a lot of really good schools and the kids that attend them are well trained. My son scored well on the SAT, was graduated from high school and was admitted to the University of Washington, a prestigious, low-cost, public university, where he is now doing well. Even though I probably could have afforded to pay for a private education, it would have not have been likely to be better than what he got from the public system here. What would have happened to him if he had grown up in rural Kentucky where the average SAT score is a hundred or so points lower on each of the three tests and a 4.0 high school grade point average isn't adequate to ensure success in a four-year college or university? I shudder to think about it.
My experience is replicated to form the aggregate in this region. We have good schools because they are publicly funded. Our state government fights hard to keep them good and resists the pressure to privatize education with vouchers and charter schools. The champions of these entrepreneurial scams claim that they can do a better job, but there is no clear evidence of their contentions. When I see news reports of experiments of this kind elsewhere, the assessments are mixed. Sometimes, the kids' test scores go down. When you divert public money from public to private schools, the quality of the education delivered diminishes in the aggregate. Allowing people to make money by repackaging a public utility does not magically make it better, and it can make it worse. Why do it at all?
People have to get over the idea that government does things poorly and give some credence to the considerable body of evidence that some things can only be delivered effectively by the government. All but the most curmudgeonly cranks will concede that defense, highways, police and fire protection must be government monopolies. Now, we have to get the legions of mean-spirited, misanthropic Republican soreheads, along with their subservient lackeys among the misguided, self-styled "conservatives" of the working class, to shut up and let the responsible adults among us add education and ... (here it is, drum roll, please) ... health care to that list of unquestionably accepted government responsibilities.
Go ahead. Choke on it and gasp. Sputter all you like. Yes, that's what I want, full-fledged socialized medicine, just like they have in Britain, France, Scandinavia, and to a large extent, every other industrialized country except this one. I don't want to hear about insurance or "coverage". I don't want to have to shell out premiums and co-payments. I don't even want to pay for my prescribed medications. I want it all, at no additional cost per incident, fully funded by general taxation, for me and everyone else in this country, whenever anyone needs it. If they can pay for it in France, we can pay for it here. We've got the money. It's just a question of tearing it away from the tight-fisted bastards who think they might get away a little cheaper by shelling out for their own needs and letting a lot of people die in the street like dogs because catastrophic medical problems were beyond their financial capacity to address.
I think these self-styled rugged individualists are hypocrites. Most of them find out that their health insurance isn't worth a damn as soon as they need some serious medical care. I've met people who vilify socialized medicine for years, yet beg pitifully for alms when they or a family member gets cancer or needs a kidney. People get converted to the idea of single-payer medical care quickly when they lose their jobs. Why would any displaced worker, desperately trying to survive on a few hundred dollars a week from unemployment benefits, shell out up to a thousand dollars a month to continue the crappy medical plan he had at work (for much less) under the insurance industry scam known as COBRA? I did once, but only because I was fairly certain of getting another job quickly. Now, with the economy in the toilet, how many people are willing to go broke paying inflated premiums for worthless health plans that cut you off as soon as you start making claims? Most people drop the medical plan and use what money they have for food and housing.
Do you get it yet? Medical care, as long as it is an economic good, will continue to be the cause of financial ruin for many, many people. Just as you have no way of knowing when a hurricane will hit, wreck your home and possibly drown you, you can't predict how much medical care you will actually need. By being bought and sold on the free market, medical care can only be reasonably managed through rationing by insurance companies. Once a profit-making firm makes a business out of anything, their focus becomes the maximization of profit. If you went to business school as I did, you know that this is the whole thing in a nutshell. Profit, in managing of medical care as a commodity, still means maximizing revenue and minimizing expense. Revenue is the premiums paid by consumers. Expenses are the payments for actual medical goods and services rendered, plus the cost of tracking and controlling the payments, that is, the army of paper-shufflers at the insurance companies. Everything left over is profit, and that's what you're trying to maximize, not the welfare of the people. That's a lot of money for things that do no good for anyone trying to get medical care. To use all the money available for medical care for medical, you have to take the insurance companies out of the picture completely. That's right. The government has to run medicine as a public utility, just like water or sewer service.
By now, if you're not already nodding with approval at the idea of socialized medicine, you're still desperately clinging to the notion that the magic of free enterprise can somehow make staying well easier to do. Snap out of it! No one is going to give you medical care unless you pay for it. You can pay the government through direct taxation, or you can pay insurance companies and HMOs a whole lot more and hope that they don't rip you off too much.
They are really ripping us all off now. Why do we, on average, pay a lot more for medical care than any other country in the world and still have worse medical care than dozens of other countries? Why aren't we getting our money's worth? Well, for starters, most estimates I've seen of how much of much the insurance companies are skimming hover around 30%. That means we have to spend about $10 to get $7 of medical care. Contrary to the popular misconception of additive proportions, this does not mean that we are paying about 30% extra for medicine. You have to take the reciprocal of 0.7, which is 1.4285714285714285714285714285714, which means we're paying actually about 43% more than we should be.
Well, what about those wasteful government bureaucracies? The what? The government side of the model for medicine is evidenced by Medicare and the Veterans Administration. They have about an overhead for administration somewhere in the range of 1% to 3%. That's not bad. Anyone who gets benefits from these agencies would much rather get them than not get them. And remember, Medicare is a system for administering payments to providers from both the government and consumers, so there is still a lot of paper-shuffling and bill collecting going on. Just imagine how much more could be saved if there was no need for accounting at all? What if we had a system for delivering medical care to those who needed it? What if all you had to worry about was getting to the clinic rather than paying for it? Wouldn't that be swell?
Hmm... Well, we do, sort of. If you're a native American living on a reservation, you can go to the U.S. Public Health Service clinic and get treated. We have an army of doctors, headed by the Surgeon General, that mainly provides socialized medicine to a privileged segment of society. There are USPHS clinics outside reservations, and you can get some service there, but they generally don't want to see you if you have alternative medical access. I got a cholera shot there once, so I could travel to South America, and they kept asking me why I wasn't "going to my regular doctor". I didn't have one and had heard through the grapevine that the USPHS clinic had the best price on cholera shots. It was reasonable, even though I failed the means test to get it for free and had to pay. I've heard that on the reservation, they don't even ask if you can afford it because medical care is part of the government's treaty obligation. They just give you the shot or the office consultation and schedule your next appointment. Sweet, huh?
I don't begrudge native Americans the least bit for their medical care system. I just want to get the same deal, full medical care at no additional cost, paid for by my taxes. It's really not asking for a lot, or anything unreasonable. The British, French and Danes all get that. Why don't we?
The totally pig-headed obstinacy of not providing blanket medical care for everyone is costing us all even more money. Recently, we've been hearing a bit how the lack of preventive medicine has resulted in much larger use of emergency rooms by poor people who have no other access to medical care. If you wait until someone passes out in a diabetic coma rather than treat them years earlier at the onset of pre-diabetic symptoms, you spend a lot more in the long run. Why don't we get this? We would actually save money by letting everyone have professional medical evaluation and treatment for free rather than wait for a serious health crisis before doing anything at all.
Well, do you get it? Socialized medicine is the only solution to the health care crisis, and the cornerstone of achieving economic viability. Without it, our economy will continue to flounder because no one can afford to hire workers and pay exorbitant prices for worthless medical insurance. Increasingly larger segments of the population will wallow in misery because they can't get the medical care they need. We're already dying sooner and are generally less healthy than people in civilized countries. About half the home foreclosures are the result of people who have been bankrupted by medical expenses. See? If we have medical care we can take jobs, even if they don't pay very much, and not worry about dying like a dog in the street. If we have medical care, we will go a long way toward solving the home mortgage crisis! People will be happy! Birds will sing and healthy, happy children will dance with joy!
I don't have a poll attached to this diatribe because I can't think of anything to ask other than, "Are you stupid or a rational, sentient human being?" Make comments if you want, but don't expect to sway me over to free market capitalism for medicine or education. I would no more want to continue with that discredited paradigm than to revert to a privately owned highway system.