I just got a new pair of glasses.  My employer paid for it.  It is part of our vision plan.  People without glasses subsidizing people with glasses.  Since I am a programmer that is pretty moot; we all have glasses.  But I didn’t pay a dime for my $300 glasses.  So basically I had no incentive to not spend my employer’s (i.e., the stockholders’) money.  That is ultimately one of the biggest problems with our current system; there is no incentive not to consume health care if you have employer-provided insurance.  Ultimately that comes out of all our salaries but it is so indirect we just don’t see it.  And it is socialism (if it looks like a duck…), just within a company.

How do we roll this back?  I personally like Singapore’s system much better than ours.  For non-catastrophic services they pay their own money out of a HSA.  So there is an incentive not to spend.  With the monkey of Medicare on our back I am not sure how to get to such a system.  Here is one idea: give working adults a choice now: the feds can let you donate money into your HSAs instead of medicare payments, and you opt-out of medicare.  Here is the catch.  It is not currently possible to buy catastrophic coverage that makes ay sense because if you actually get sick they will find a way to drop you.  That is some insurance reform that I do approve of.  If that logistical problem can be solved, I think I would opt-out myself.  But for now there is not a good alternative to medicare for your golden years– we need to change that.

I have a coworker who is always on about how Teapartiers are just the “new JBS” who are “a bunch of nuts”.  I have always heard the John Birch Society was an extremist group but I have been looking at www.jbs.org lately and I don’t see what all the fuss is about.  They have several basic principles:

• property rights
• anti-communism
• Christian values
• growth is good

There is nothing I could find on their web site that had militia-like stuff on it or any promotion of violence except as a nation in defense of itself.  The one thing I saw some red staters (possibly myself included but as I have written before I am in favor of nukes, nukes, and more nukes and fewer conventional forces) would object to is they want less military spending.  So I ask you fellow red staters, where did this organization get such a bad name?  Are they just getting a smear like the Teapartiers because that is easier than addressing the issues they raise?

While I hate the idea of federally controlled socialized medicine, I find it ironic I have been on socialized medicine in the private sector all my adult life.  In my industry you couldn’t hire somebody without giving group health insurance; you just wouldn’t be competitive otherwise.  So in addition to my salary, my compensation includes a group policy for my family.  I have one office mate with no wife or kids, and one with a wife six kids.  They do the same job and have approximately the same salary.  I figure the single guy is receiving about $15k a year less in compensation because of this “within company” socialism.   I’ve tried to do some digging into how we got into this mess, and from what I can tell insurance started getting linked to employment as a way around wage caps in WW2 (I would love to know more from those that have studied more than I have).  Is there a way for us to unroll this?   Counting your insurance as taxable income would help IF it were coupled to lowering the income tax rate– perhaps part of a flat tax plan?

Couple this with the socialized schooling and tax exemptions you get for dependents, and I wonder just what percentage of our socialist wealth transfer occurs among employed people just based on their number of dependents.