Some notes on health care

The state legislature yesterday passed a bevy of bills for Gov. Schwarzenegger to veto. Among them: Universal Health Care coverage for all Californians, a bill that would make it harder for companies like Wal-Mart to open superstores, a ban on school textbooks and curricula from including negative comments about homosexuals, and a law designating Zinfandel as the historic wine of California. It's heartwarming to know that some of these important issues -- health care, gay rights, and...uh, wine -- are still a priority for some forward-thinking politicians. That these bills were passed only as symbolic measures, as well as to take jabs at Schwarzenegger, is a bit less heartwarming, and shows the length that needs to be traversed before the progressive agenda can become actual policy.

Health care has been on my mind recently; I've been flipping through The Cult of Efficiency, and while it's focused on the Canadian health care system in the particular, it paints a dire picture about our cultural values vis-à-vis public goods and private markets. Its main point isn't exactly startling -- language can be and is misused for political ends (well, duh) -- but the extent at which language of efficiency has been misused gives pause. In our free-market economy, common sense says that the private sector will be able to deliver goods like education and health care with more efficiency than the public sector when no evidence for such exists, though some of the unexpected fringe benefits of the private sector (greater accountability, fostering a culture of choice) add wrinkles to this private/public split.

So far, Massachusetts is the only state to require everyone to be insured, and it should be intriguing to see whether or not their system, where health insurance is treated like car insurance, will be workable when it is implemented next year.