More regulations

I spent part of my youth in a country with a social "safety net" medicine scheme and benefited from it. Not perfect but it beats treating your poor in the emergency room and then passing the unrecovered costs along in insurance premiums on everyone else. Bad health is a crap shoot, and some sort of universal sharing of the risks is at least part of the properly engineered system to deliver health. So, despite my general preference for individual resposibility and minimal government interference, this is one area I was open to seeing if a sensible redesign of the US health system and some government role might be possible.

Now the USA can argue many things about why the enormous money spent does not add up to great health for all - but one thing everyone pretty much agrees on is the system is wasteful. The estimates range from $300Bn to $500Bn of waste - the low number comes from doing the accounts and the high number comes from benchmarking ratios of budget spent on care versus overall budget against other nations. Ballpark, 20% waste. And mind you, we are not talking about the cost of the insurance industry here. This is 20% waste after your insurance company pays its salesforce, staff, and takes a profit. Ask a Republican or ask a Democrat and they will agree this is a bad thing and one of the main arguments raised to move the issue into gear this year.

Hey, sounds like an ideal opportunity for bipartisan results right? Both parties agree the problem exists, and a few hundred $Bn saved is a plum that many a lawmaker would love to go back to constituents and say "all my work!". But the strange thing is, the bipartisan unity was that none of what they actually did seems to have anything to do with solving this waste.

Instead we got two things. We got a pathetic half effort at allowing a public option for insurance, and we got 2,000 pages of new rules for the insurance companies to navigate. Oh, and for you and me to navigate too. Joy. Will any of this reduce costs or eliminate waste? Of course not. 2,000 pages of federal regulations and a new entitlement agency should be a bitter poison for both liberals and conservatives to swallow.

What was that oath again? "First, do no harm?" Well I guess there is one thing to be thankful about our governing representatives - they are not practicing medicine.

But seriously, Representatives and Senators. This is just so horribly wrong. Can't you feel how badly this process is betraying the people you represent? Is this your idea of representative democracy? Do you think the USA can be great if you keep screwing us around like this?

Clearly Capitol Hill is incapable of seeing how seriously dysfunctional it has become, if this kind of disastrous burden is the only work product it can imagine and deliver.

One Megaword

Government has a tendency to decline in quality. Stopping this is difficult. Revolutions don't usually work, the odds are heavy on getting a new crew of criminals. Constitutions can be circumvented, ignored, or even forgotten, as the US Congress illustrates. So a good elected government drones on, churns out bad law and pork barrel, and over time the junk accumulates. A two century old democracy has a lot of stupidity codified and ever decreasing will to deal with it. How could this be remedied?

An indirect way is to limit the work product of government. Consider if the total of legislation could not exceed a million words - and moreover, words found in a ten year old dictionary just to keep them simple and to the point. If you want to write something new in, you have to cut something old out to make room. And give the courts the ability to cancel sections as being incomprehensible, so you can't get too cryptic. Hey, maybe just appoint a jury in a randomly selected jurisdiction and have them read one new law and pass judgement on whether it is clear (maybe answer a set of multiple choice questions about it). Assign each law (including laws alterred by deletions) to a different district. Make sure we can all understand the rules.

After all, nearly all of us remember less than a million words. If some issue is not important enough to rate a few sentences in the most important million words, then firstly why is congress concerning itself with such pointless detail, and secondly why should citizens need to worry about it? A million words, that is about 2,000 words per congress person or 10,000 words per senator. And still a million words each citizen might be touched by.

Oh and that includes budget items. And you can't cancel a section within 4 years except retroactively (which means if it was law anyone in conflict with it is pardoned and compensated, and if it was revenue the government gives it back with interest).

Maybe that would get a government to sit up straight and pay attention to the essentials.