Obama’s “Animal House” Policy for Medicare

The trustees of the Medicare system recently reported that the program will go broke in the year 2024—five years sooner than was projected just last year.

The millions of Americans who have been counting on Medicare to be a reliable, stable guarantor of affordable health care in their senior years should be asking themselves, “Who is responsible for this predicament?” The short answer is “lots of people,” but let’s start by looking in the mirror.

The shameful status of Medicare brings to mind a sequence in the movie Animal House. A freshman pledge, Flounder, let some upperclassmen in the fraternity use his brother’s brand-new Lincoln for a road trip. Naturally, the brothers trashed the car. As Flounder wept in regret, the suave, smooth-talking senior, Otter, put his arm around Flounder’s shoulder and explained the facts of life to him: “You [goof]ed up; you trusted us.” (“Goof” replaces the original R-rated verb.)

“We the people” have goofed up big time, trusting a government bureaucracy to oversee our health care.

When will we learn that gigantic bureaucracies—undisciplined by the profit-motive and insulated from the normal competitive pressures of the marketplace—are inherently inefficient?

Read More at Floyd Reports By Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson, Floyd Reports