Strike The Root Blog

Health insurance is a mess. Indeed. I’m watching Michael Moore (and moore and moore) on Leno. Interesting mention of the bonus plan in England: Doctors get bonuses at the end of the year, based off of how well their patients improve. Also, Moore made some interesting admissions that Hillary and the Democrats are just as complicit in the health care debacle as are the Republicans.

Wonderful. An excuse for socialized medicine? No doubt. Never mind that there are so many other aspects to the problem: deliberate limited competition among doctors (causing price increases), ludicrous lawsuits and awards based on sympathy (creating ludicrous doctor insurance costs), costs signed off by a consumer that never sees them, and excessive government bureaucracy, to name a few. The government itself created many, if not most, of the problems in health care today.

It all leads to cries again for socialized medicine (aka “universal health care”). The government should handle it, says Moore. It’s a “human right.”

Here’s one simple argument against: I work hard to live a healthy lifestyle. I resent the notion that I should be helping pay for someone who does not—for example, an X-games motocross competitor, or, say, an unhealthy tub like Moore.

Ahh, the arrogance, to try and force one’s moral system onto the rest of us.

In Colorado Springs, I had the opportunity to choose and change my waste removal company (Waste Management, BFI, etc.). I chose Waste Management, who managed to keep my business by being fairly efficient and responsive over the past 12 years. They removed my trash once per week, for which I paid them what I thought was a reasonable rate.

I recall one angry letter writer complaining to the local paper that this was a horrible affront to the environment. “Why not have one desginated collector, so we don’t waste fuel with trucks running the same routes?”

I recently moved to Southlake, Texas, where real estate taxes are very high (at least in comparison to Colorado Springs). (I’m not very bright, it seems.) Trash removal here is a “free” municipal function.

So, how does trash collection here compare? Well, Southlake residents are mostly upper-income folks. I suspect that many of them have a high sense of entitlement. So my trash is removed twice per week. And if I call the city to say I forgot to put my trash out, they’ll come back at the end of their run and pick it up. (Waste Management would do that, but they’d charge you for it, and would do it the next day.) They’d even make a special trip to pick up any large amount of trash–Southlake residents can’t bear to look upon trash too long.

From an environmental standpoint, this kind of waste is obscene, as bad as or worse than the free market solution offered in Colorado Springs. From my standpoint, it well depicts the kind of financial waste that government is good at ignoring.

Dependability is also an issue. I put my trash out sometimes and it just doesn’t get picked up. Tuesday’s trash is still outside–a quarter inch of snow on the ground is too much to handle. That makes twice in the few months we’ve lived here that my trash has been an eyesore. Yet I can’t remember a single time in 12 years that Waste Management neglected to pick up my trash.

Certain people out there like to decry the fact that there’s too much choice. Too bad they have to force their narrow minds on the rest of us.