…and crowded emergency rooms? Then you’ll love ObamaCare.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems sort of related: What if supermarkets were like public schools?
Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—”for free”—from its neighborhood public supermarket.
No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.
Nirvana!
Andy Galambos (of Free Enterprise Institute fame, now largely forgotten unfortunately in some ways) used to use a supermarket analogy, too.
In a collectivist-inspired store, you go in to buy a bottle of ketchup.
When you walk up to get the kind you want (brand, size, quantity), the store employee stops you, gets on the loudspeaker and asks for a vote on what you are permitted to have. If you object by saying you just want to buy a bottle of ketchup, you are ejected from the market, or arrested. There’s even the possibility that they will make you take a jar of mustard instead, claiming that it’s better for you than ketchup.
This is the difference between what a government claiming to be a democracy ends up giving you and what a free market (which is the true democracy) gives you.
In a free market, you walk up, choose your ketchup, pay for it and you’re on your way. No worries.
When it comes to my doctor, can’t I just buy my own damn bottle of ketchup?
Analogies like these are the most potent weapon we have to combat bureaucracies. The same analogy can be made with regard to spaceflight, postal service, welfare management systems, even our libraries could be better managed by private firms held to milestones and fixed price contracts.
If a true voucher system on a level playing field were created the public schools would see is the departure of the populace in droves. That would include those higher needs students whose parents have already run into the limitations imposed by the public school system. No parent in their right mind would continue to see their tax dollars wasted on the subpar education being delivered now when they could vote with their feet and enroll their child in the clean, safe, effective school down the street. And, yes that school would require more involvement by the parents, but parents would gladly give their time if they saw positive results rather than frustrating meetings with less than effective bureaucrats.