Ruled By Pretense

The Democrats appear to employ a pretense of knowledge, in which they speak about a topic, try to establish that they have a breadth of knowledge and are somehow reasonable, and then they go and do whatever it is that nobody has any business doing. This is what's going on now with the healthcare system. It won't work. In fact it has been demonstrated not to work and cost way to much money in every nation that it has been tried. And yet, it's coming soon anyway, and ABC will make sure you understand Obama is smart enough to make it work.

Anyone with a real understanding of this issue would be getting the government further out of the medical field. Many prices are actually set at ridiculously high levels due to the way the government sets prices for Medicaid and Medicare. Massive regulation also contributes to the cost, as does the pernicious effects of a third party payment system. Both the doctor and the patient tend to be cushioned against the costs of their decisions.

Meanwhile, since this isn't just a post on healthcare, may I mention that Republicans eschew the pretense of knowledge and instead merely practice pretense, though I suppose we could call it a pretense of morality. They don't suggest that they know more than they know, in fact you can often find them being downright anti-intellectual, but they do suggest that if you vote for them they won't do all the bad things the Democrats do. Sometimes they even suggest they might get rid of all the nasty things that happened in the last century. A pretense to be sure.