anglingfortruth

Against National Health Care

I am adamantly opposed to any federal government involvement in health care. By studying Washington D.C.'s public education policy, we can see the inverse relationship between government involvement and acceptable results. According to the Cato Institute, the annual cost to educate a student in Washington D.C.'s public school system (DCPS) is over $24,000/yr, while the average D.C. private school educates a child for $14,000/yr. Ironically, the children graduating from the less expensive/more efficient D.C. private schools go to college at exponentially higher rates than the graduates of the more expensive/less efficient public schools. In response, poor D.C. families are screaming for vouchers so their children can attend the less expensive/more efficient private schools. We learn from the DCPS experience that when the government forcefully extracts tax dollars from the wealthy to fund government schools, it doesn't adequately close the education gap between the rich and poor; it merely creates class enmity between them.

It is no secret that the free market educates children much more efficiently than the
government school system. Similarly, freer markets will deliver more efficient health
care. One only has to look at the ever-increasing price of a hip replacement (where the government influences the price) compared to the ever-decreasing cost of Lasik or cosmetic surgery (where the free market sets the price) to see that the least expensive procedures are the ones the federal government doesn't price fix.

Senator Obama opposed giving poor D.C. families any choice in where they educate their children, yet he opted to send his own children to private school when they moved to D.C.  If he treats public health care the same way he treated D.C. education, we can be sure his own family will not have to contend with the substandard public system he is working so hard to impose on the rest of us.


Joseph D. Coco Jr.