Quasi makes me Queasy

August 23rd, 2009 • admin
Email This Post Email This Post - Print This Post Print This Post - Subscribe

Feeling Sightly Queasy about the public option?

What will a public option do to you?

What are quasi governmental organizations?

Without getting too mired in the small print differentiating  quasi governmental organizations, GSEs, GOCs, SOEs, GLCs et al the unifying meaning we should all keep in mind is “While the entity may receive some revenue from charging customers for its services, these organizations are often partially or majorly funded by the government.”

That means that most of these entities are either; unprofitable taxpayer subsidized organizations; too big to fail, so much for effective regulation; too entrenched or too politically important to fail or be sold off to private enterprise. While I would need considerable study to opine on each one of these, I feel strongly that this list should be shortened and not lengthened if there are any alternatives.

There are alternatives to to the public option in the current debate on health care.

New American Proverb slowly making it’s way into the collective consciousness: “Make no new unavoidable mistakes like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if there are any options.”

Repeat, there are great options to a public option that primarily relates to beginning a process of untangling counterproductive and corrupting spider webs of rules, laws, regulations that impede free enterprise and prevent the direct negotiation between consumer and provider to establish market value.

If the government gives me food stamps, they should let me choose and negotiate with whomever I want to get my groceries from and yes, that also means the government must let me buy all of the fattening foods rather than healthiers choices. Oh, yeah, seems like that is the governments hands off policy based on much visible evidence.

If an insurance company charges more for higher risk for obesity, that seems like a rational risk based pricing any insurance company (or the government, goodness forbid) should  engage in.  Managing risk, revenues and costs can not be dirty words or we are doomed to a build up to more taxpayer bailouts in the future.

Politically motivated promises of unlimited coverage in this day and age, of spectacularly increasing medical advances, longivity and the whopper costs that come with technology and delivering those techniques, can only insure a futue failure of some magnitude, forcing the taxpayer to anti up or borrow more, all without enough transparency for the taxpayers to understand the increasing risks until it is too late.

If the government, in an honest and transparent way, voted to contribute taxpayer money as partially matching money to monies collected by a dedicated high profile nonprofit, for the purpose of providing national funding for extraordinary costs not insured or capped and that the insured can not pay for, I would applaud that as an appropriate, shared way, to subsidize those unfortunates that most of us care about, regardless of their circumstances and would like to see them covered.

Consider this list of various government managed corporations based on Wikipedia recently updated to include the owner of Chevrolet!

The Government owned corporations of the United States are as follows:

Some day I hope to delve into and research more of these listings.

Perhaps I should wait until Big Pharma develops a new Quasi Queasy Pill with few side effects.

Post a Response

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture.
Anti-Spam Image