As an aside, I will mention that I get my auto and home insurance through Amica, which is a mutual insurance company. As a member-owner, any profits come back to me as dividends. Since we currently have what the managers believe are sufficient reserves, this year I'm getting a dividend check for 20% of the premium that I paid last year! If only health insurance worked similarly.
And yeah, to me as well, a single-payer system seems the least broken way to handle health care. But I'm also more and more leery of givng additional functions to our governments. To analogize to computers, the web server should not be part of the OS kernel, because the failure cases are too horrible to contemplate. This feels very similar to my doubts as to whether our hypothetical community/state/nation insurance pool should be run by the same organization that has the power to lock us up in prison, and which dabbles in torture and secret kill lists enforced by robot assassins. Back to computers, there are some jobs that are better handled as services, running as daemons in the background, but no matter how important those jobs may be, they should still be separate from the kernel and the Really Dangerous Stuff, even it it's not quite as efficient. I think of it as three broad categories of process - kernel, services, and user. Whereas we tend to think of public and private sector as being a binary choice. Maybe there should be some third way, some type of organization that can leverage the state's police power while remaining entirely separate from it, and that can, somehow, be insulated a bit from the toxic demagoguery of politics.
Which makes me wonder whether Fannie Mae was quite so bad an idea as I had thought. Which is a bizarre enough idea that I'm unsure whether I went off the rails somewhere along that line of reasoning, and just haven't realized it yet. :)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-08-27 07:56 am (UTC)And yeah, to me as well, a single-payer system seems the least broken way to handle health care. But I'm also more and more leery of givng additional functions to our governments. To analogize to computers, the web server should not be part of the OS kernel, because the failure cases are too horrible to contemplate. This feels very similar to my doubts as to whether our hypothetical community/state/nation insurance pool should be run by the same organization that has the power to lock us up in prison, and which dabbles in torture and secret kill lists enforced by robot assassins. Back to computers, there are some jobs that are better handled as services, running as daemons in the background, but no matter how important those jobs may be, they should still be separate from the kernel and the Really Dangerous Stuff, even it it's not quite as efficient. I think of it as three broad categories of process - kernel, services, and user. Whereas we tend to think of public and private sector as being a binary choice. Maybe there should be some third way, some type of organization that can leverage the state's police power while remaining entirely separate from it, and that can, somehow, be insulated a bit from the toxic demagoguery of politics.
Which makes me wonder whether Fannie Mae was quite so bad an idea as I had thought. Which is a bizarre enough idea that I'm unsure whether I went off the rails somewhere along that line of reasoning, and just haven't realized it yet. :)