Tim Cavanaugh, writing at Reason magazine, has an excellent column on the failures of the light rail system introduced into Los Angeles over the last decade. It's a story of the abject failure of top-down bureaucratic policy that completely ignores market forces. The short version: after spending billions of taxpayer dollars, the results are (a) less mass transit available to the poor people who need it the most, and (b) more congestion on Los Angeles streets. Read Mr. Cavanaugh's column to see how government failed so completely, and why a market-driven solution would have succeeded.
You may well ask why my post's title mentions ObamaCare. What does the transit system have to do with health care?
Nothing, of course. But what is relevant is that ObamaCare explicitly moves much of the control of our health care system to a huge federal bureaucracy. The same bureaucracy that brought us the U.S. Post Office, guided the Los Angeles mass transit debacle, and a long string of other disastrous failures – and damned few notable successes.
Why would anyone, even a rabid Obama supporter, want their health care controlled by people with such a wonderful record of expensive failures? Why would anyone believe that this time things will be different, and the federal bureaucracy will magically become competent? Ask the poor people of Los Angeles how happy they are with their shiny new mass transit system – and their greatly reduced cheap bus system. Then ask yourself how happy you're likely to be with a bunch of overpaid, can't-be-fired, incompetent bozo bureaucrats deciding which treatment you're allowed to have, and when you can have it, the next time you badly need medical attention...
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