I must be getting old

At an extended family gathering today, the subject of St. Hillary's health care plan came up. A certain relative, filled with ready numbers and the confidence that arises therefrom, was absolutely certain that it would prove to meet the health care needs of Americans far better than not only the current system but any other system in place anywhere, and by the fire in his eyes I could tell he was primed to take on all comers.

I, for my part, walked away.

It's not that I could not have argued. Despite the assurances of Mr. Confident that St. Hillary's plan is not socialized medicine, what little I have read of it* leads me to believe that even so it will suffer that bane of all socialist programs: the inability to efficiently allocate resources because of a lack of pricing information. "Single payer" programs always suffer monopoly pricing because they are, at their heart, monopolies, and without the input of market prices to tell where more or fewer resources are needed always result in a sorry combination of abundance and scarcity**. It cannot be any other way, as no committee can possibly make decisions as efficiently as 300 million people acting in their own self-interest. My suspicion is that her program will combine the effectiveness of the border patrol with the customer-service skills of the TSA, resulting in a whole nation full of VA hospitals.

But I guess it was just too nice a day to spend it banging my head against a wall.


* Which is very little aside from what explanation/advertisement appears on her website.

** Usually an abundance of statues of Lenin and a scarcity of bread.