Reforming our views of "Reform"

I think that, like in many other things, in health care our arguments have lost the forest for the trees--we have forgotten the core arguments of our country in trying to address a smaller section of ourselves.
I have heard several arguments for health care that i think are interesting. Many apply to my last post. but I will respond here to some my friends have made that may not.
1) People who do not buy insurance are a burden to society, and therefore a government responsibility. First of all, the idea that these people are going to get cancer treatments paid by the taxpayers is incredibly unlikely. Actually, the only thing that could even possibly be paid for by the government when someone without insurance becomes ill is going to be their emergency room visits, unless you choose to donate to their particular "save _______" fund, but it is not a social cost. In hospitals now, if you do not have the money for a treatment, for the most part, you go without it, or you go into debt. If you go into debt, and you go bankrupt, your cost will be absorbed by banks and creditors, who assume this will happen from time to time, before it is absorbed by the populace as a whole, so the chances of this hitting your average joe are slim at best.
2) Premiums are out of control. We have to do something or all is lost. This is a question of where the government's control is. To be honest, I don't think that the government should have anything to do with health care. My support of tort reform stems from a desire to get it out of the judicial as well as the legislative process. The American government was not meant to be a social institution. It was meant to be a control of peace so that people could solve their own problems. With passage of social bills like health care, we look to government to do something that it was never meant to do--solve our personal insolvencies. If government be expected to do this, government is expected to fundamentally restrict the way you and i live, and it destroys the aims of our constitutional government
3) Shortly I will reply to the idea of coverage under private plans: The current system is set up so that people are grouped into certain risk pools. This is, to my knowledge, one of the only ways that one can make insuring against a universally occurring problem (sickness) economically viable. If, as will soon be the case, a healthy person is charged the same amount as one on his deathbed, or one who takes huge risks in his personal life, the cost will go up and at some point insurers will have to charge more than a policy is worth to anyone to cover their overheads. What we do by forcing companies to accept pre-existing conditions seems like a charitable venture on face, and that is why it has so much support, but by the very nature of economics, this is the death knell for the whole idea of insurance, which is based on you paying a fee for something that may or may not happen to you. tow results will occur. A) people are not going to buy insurance until they are sick. While this is supposedly covered by the mandate for health insurance, such a mandate will have to be pretty steep if it is to entice people to not pay premiums that will rise yearly with the increase in risk. I do not think that the current excise, while it is shocking, would be such an incentive. B) private companies are going to be forced out of the picture. thus limiting competition and further increasing costs to you. this is because the companies, as stated before, no longer have a statistical advantage to working insurance. their bet now has to be that they can get enough people to drive their costs lower than competition. Problem here is that the federal system has a larger pool inherently and is subsidized to the tune of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and Insurance companies get more taxes than they used to so they get undercut by the government and go out of business. Result: A exponentially growing, single payer system, and soon.

Accountable to the Spirit of Freedom

Congress continues to debate it's healthcare 'resolution' if one could ever call it such. The vote is meant to be completed by the end of this week--on Sunday, probably, because the house cannot garner the votes that it needs to pass any of the various kinds of legislation it has been fighting over.
The fact that the "final" (though i doubt very much it will be 'final' until it passes) deadline is just before the easter recess of congress makes me a bit nervous. being a, if only amateur, student of the constitution, I am again making my way through the federalist papers. This morning, i read from federalist 57 where James Madison argues that the House of Representatives will be fully accountable to the people. he makes three distinctive arguments 1) that the House has to face reelection often and thus is unlikely to do anything flagrantly against the will of those who gave them power. 2) That the people we elect to office aught to be, as often as possible, enlightened statesmen who would seek the liberty of all people. and 3) Those laws they create must apply equally to themselves as much as others. It is here that Madison makes a chilling point. He admits that at some point congress may seek to create laws from which it is exempt and here demands that the people be not tolerant of this unjust action. To Madison, the very tolerance of any such law would be contrary to the "vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America"
says Madison:
"If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the Legislature as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty."
A chilling statement indeed. Now, It is of comfort to note that the America people have thus far shown little tolerance for the actions of a congress bent on toying with some of the worst of kickbacks (think cornhuskers) and threats against representatives and abuse of power. But it is interesting to note that Congress is seeking to insulate itself from the public by having an up or down vote on this bill before the people can have their way with their representatives during town hall meetings. if you'll remember, the last one's were not so pleasant for democratic congressmen.
Whether congress succeeds or not, I'll bet that easter recess is not pretty for them. I will be keeping my eyes out for the people's response--it's time we show that we will not tolerate a Congress of follies.

Deficits-Moral and Monetary

Like most people, I have been taking a lot of interest in the budgets of the worlds nations over the last few months. This week Greece nearly went bankrupt, and seems to still be in a world of financial trouble--even talking about asking the IMF to help it solve it's debt problems, and the Congressional Budget Office stated that by 2020 the United States national debt will breach 20 trillion (with a "T") dollars. As if these problems weren't enough, the EU faces even more countries with impending debt crises. Besides the fact it seems oddly like our world leaders are in desperate need in lessons in economics and budgeting, there is another, deeper problem that i think our impending debt crisis shows.
As a people, we have gotten used to living beyond our means. it amazes me that in greece, where the country was on track to go completely bankrupt by the end of this year, people could be protesting because the government was cutting programs, not because the government failed to create a viable budget in the past ten years--the former was a necessity following  the latter, which was a case of really bad stewarding by the federal government.
The chants of the people basically asking the ailing governments to "save our programs" have been repeated in the United States as well. What surprises me about this is not that students are angry about more fees, or that greek workers are angry about going without pay--I understand that these are terrible things to inflict upon any constituency--but that the people do not seem to believe that the crisis comes from the proverbial ocean of programs that the people have asked the government to initiate. We have come to think of the government like a community college student living in his parent's basement at 30 thinks of his mom--as an unending source of unlimited income and sustenance, which should always do more to help us do less. The problem is that the government is based upon our productivity: the taxes we pay run the programs we ask for, and so to create new programs, taxes must rise. But as the government removes more and more of our responsibility from us, we do less, and therefore are less capable of paying taxes and thus paying the debt that our government is taking on for us. The government earns less money in exchange for more expensive labor saving programs for its people, thus creating an economic sink hole of sorts, where there is never enough money to pay the bills that everyone puts on the tab of a government they don't care to see.
In short, the solution to our budget problems is inherently a difficultly conservative one: we need to cut ourselves from the umbilical cord we have tied to the Federal government and become a self-sustaining people. This is hard because the prospect of cheap insurance, housing subsidies, and even tax credits for having children look so good on face, but in the long run, they deteriorate our ability to live independent of governmental oversight, and worse, set a government that was never build to deal with such massive spending on a collision course with unsustainable projects.
 This is one reason why I support a very limited role for the federal government: i believe that a people should be relatively independent of their mother government. After all, John Locke and Rousseau, two philosophers who really gave birth to the idea of our governing system, saw mankind as independent, relying on government only in the resolution of conflict. it was fro this framework that mankind was said to have the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The ironic threat we now face is that the programs meant to create happiness for all people are destroying our inalienable right to liberty in the people they serve.