Why Doctors (and Democrats) should not be allowed near health care funding decisions

The Corner - National Review Online quotes Yaaaaarghweh, Howard Dean on the pending demise of the individual mandate in Obamcare. : "Dean: We just said all comers will have to get insurance and you can’t charge — this is why our bill is so much better than what they passed — you can’t charge more than 20 percent above the basic rate; in the Senate it’s 300 percent, based on age. The fact of the matter is that I thought the president was right in the campaign. Academically you want a mandate. The American people aren’t going to put up with a mandate. I made this prediction before and I’m going to make it again: by the time this thing goes into effect in 2014, I think the mandate will be gone either through the courts or because it’s unpopular. You don’t need it. There will be two or three percent of the people who cheat. That is not enough to bring the system to a halt and people don’t like to be told what to do."

So much silliness, so little time but here's a few funnies.

Did you come to this public conclusion before or after Missouri voters went 7 to 3 against it?

Where did you get your 2-3 percent number? Vermont. Politician competence essay question: please compare and contrast California, Texas and Florida with Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Pay particular attention to differing demographics, geography and culture. Discuss how this could lead to the same policy yielding wildly differing results.

While the detailed bits of healthcare sausage in the bill are disgusting, it's the actual objective that is insane. A key tenet of public policy is (or should be given rational politicians) to thoughtfully consider human behavior and markets and to attempt to design policies that to the greatest extent possible 'sail with the wind' of how human beings actually order their lives out in the non-bureaucratic wild.  It is a basic tenet of our society that you pay for what you get when you get it (if you don't believe it just try to walk out of Walmart with that chain saw and no receipt.  Gee, why is this?  Well it turns out that we are most careful and thoughtful about those things that we must pay for.  If someone else pays for something or if we pay a huge bundled monthly then when it comes time to utilize the resources we suddenly lose of sally shopper persona - we become as sailors on shore leave.  The markets recognize this and act accordingly.  The goal of our our wildly inflating government led services (education and healthcare being the big 2) should be to reintroduce pricing/consumer discipline by making sure that families bear the cost of what they use.  Until we do that we're just going to auger in more.

One other observation: why is it that those who are most committed to 'diversity' are the same people who advocate nationalize all major domestic policy? I mean VT and TX are as different as two different countries. Yet the diversity cliches don't extend to recognizing real diversity where diverse policies make the most sense. They dig pigment and genetalia. When you get to brains and culture the left assumes (and has the substance) of a blank slate upon which they can write their baroque manichean fantasies.