The Maverick Tribe

If, as suggested by early reports, Mr. Moore is advocating that Americans model our health care system after Canada , France , or Cuba , and that we abolish the profit motive, this does not bode well for the next president’s attempts to craft decent health care policy for the nation.  Nationalized, single-payer health care for all is a noble ambition but will spell bankruptcy for the U.S. Treasury.

Liberals think of health care as a quasi-civil right, a new government-funded entitlement.  Conservatives look at health care through the lens of free-market economics, in terms of consumers rather than patients, incentives rather than mandates, and moral hazard rather than moral obligation.  Both sides are right.  Any workable solution to our health care problem needs to address both these views.  That’s why we need to start thinking about tiers of health care:  basic/preventive/catastrophic care guaranteed to everyone; premium/non-essential/elective care as a tax-deductible out-of-pocket expense.  This is the only way we’ll manage to hold down costs.  And for a society that prides itself on economic mobility and so-called “labor market flexibility” (i.e., it’s easy for companies to hire and fire), we must decouple health care from employment.

It’s hard to boil down a complex problem like this, one that Hillary Clinton required over 1000 pages to address in her nonstarter plan back in 1993, in a blog post.  But suffice it to say that a stridently ideological approach such as Mr. Moore’s is not going to fly.  Mr. Moore apparently believes that the whole concept of profiting from health services is crass.  But the profit motive creates enormous efficiencies in an economic system.  What if the crass approach is the best one?  I’m looking for an idea that works, not one that satisfies a left-wing filmmaker’s emotional aesthetic.

I just checked the statistics from my blog, and I noticed this post was visited by someone linking from Google with the search term "brazilian bitches".

Here on out, it's going to be mainly political musings.  If I'm ever going to find a job with a persuasive writing component, I'd better start practicing.  Also, politics has taken center stage in my headspace in recent years.  The election of 2004 had me obsessed over the horserace, from rooting for Howard Dean (my Vermont governor) to embracing Senator John Kerry as my only hope for the unseating of President George W. Bush.  I distinctly remember Election Day 2004.  All day at work, I kept checking the blogosphere for any morsel of early exit poll results.  Mid-afternoon, word was leaked that John Kerry was leading.  I saw the stock market dive and my mood lift.  Finally as polls began to close on the East Coast (I was, of course, living in California at the time), the exit polling results were published to the internet and I was able to review them myself.  Ignoring my own academic training on the power of sample bias on statistical measurements, I believed these results to indicate a convincing Kerry victory.  As I left work that night, I was walking on air.  John Kerry had won!  No more George Bush.  No more having my intelligence insulted on a daily basis.  No more contempt for civil liberties and constitutional tradition.  No more Fear.

Needless to say, the elation didn’t last long.  The following morning, dejection took its place – and had company.  It was palpable on the streets and in the subways of San Francisco .  Really.  A pall hung over the city, whose electorate had gone 80% to Mr. Kerry.  But as for me, it was on this day that I realized how much the nation’s political stage plays out on my psychological well-being.  Without trying to sound too embittered, I’ll say Act 2 of George W. Bush has turned out to be a real tragi-comedy.

This blog is not going to be a George W. Bush Hate-a-thon.  First of all, there are enough of those out there, and second-of-all, we need to start looking beyond the George W. Bush era, in which “only” nineteen months remain. For what it’s worth, I’ve always given the man credit where credit is due.  (He has an admirable record on international humanitarianism, for example.)  And the funny thing is, despite charges leveled by my significant other that I’m “the most partisan person” he’s ever known, I’ve never thought of myself as a Democrat.  Indeed, of the three gubernatorial elections in which I’ve voted in California , I chose the Democratic candidate in none of them.  (Libertarian, Republican, and Libertarian.)  But the national political environment over that last six years has made me feel aligned with the far left on a whole host of issues, from warrant-less wiretapping to torturing prisoners to the Federal Marriage Amendment.  (And someone still needs to explain to me why it should be only the left that is opposed to these things.)  Furthermore, I embrace the radical, borderline-subversive position that the whole notion of fighting a “War on Terror” represents little more than a Sisyphean challenge.  Let’s get real.

So there you have it.  The re-launch of MaverickTribe – one man’s oxymoronic quest for community and autonomy through a blog.  I’ll keep you posted.