Is Health Care The Next Railroad Industry?
Doom, Economics, Health Care August 21st. 2009, 4:24pmReading this wiki article on Amtrak, it strikes me that we are likely to see the same type of deterioration in the health sector as we saw in the rail transportation sector over the course of the twentieth century. Rail transport was once the most vital and important American industry – its sad decline is a story of government error and mismanagement of economic decisions. If the Democrats succeed in passing their inchoate health care plans, we can look forward to a creaking, half-functional system that prevents private market actors from doing the job, while doing a poor job itself.
August 21st, 2009 at 5:29 pm
The article you cite says that rail transportation was in decline, and government involvement salvaged it. For private industry, if it doesn’t make money, then switch to something else. But Americans thought it would be a public benefit to maintain a passenger rail system and were willing to pay.
By analogy, if it’s not profitable to keep some people healthy in the U.S., then they are not kept healthy. But it is a public good to have a healthy populace– one worth paying for.
Now comes the hard part. Predicting how well it will be done.
Hayes summarizes the Amtrak article: “Its sad decline is a story of government error and mismanagement”
In fact, the article is clear that the decline is not the result of error as much as of deliberate attempts by Republicans to kill it or, failing that, to weaken it. As long as republicans are kept bound and sedated, government programs can be adequately funded and they can work. But they must never, ever be allowed to be in charge again.
August 21st, 2009 at 5:49 pm
The government creation of Amtrak cobbled together something from the wreckage, but the wreckage was created by a half-century of bad regulation and political overrides of market mechanisms. Republicans have tried to kill Amtrak, as a federal program, not rail travel as a concept.
And if you keep the Republicans bound and sedated, you’ll never get your government programs funded because it’s the Republicans out paying the taxes
August 21st, 2009 at 6:03 pm
OK, but of all the “political overrides of market mechanisms” (and some described in the article do seem quite idiotic), surely building roads was the largest. Rail declined because the government made driving relatively easy, convenient, and inexpensive. Please don’t tell me you think Eisenhower was wrong?
But you grant that Amtrak has repeatedly been undermined by the GOP’s conviction that it ought not be funded. I hope that this doesn’t happen with health care. Time and again those who argue that government doesn’t work exert their efforts to prove this is so, even when they have ostensibly taken on the job of running it. It would be like putting atheists in charge of religious education and then, after they stopped fixing the buildings or buying textbooks or supporting teachers, agreeing with them that the shoddy state of religious schools is proof that secular people ought to be in control.
August 21st, 2009 at 7:38 pm
As PJ O’Rourke says, Democrats are the party that promise a government that will solve everything, and then get elected and break the promise; Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then get elected and prove it.