Or, Republicans Can Be Leftists Too!
We all want to what we think is the best for the folks under our care; at least I HOPE that’s what we wanna do. Now, I understand that at the margin, there are politicians that do enter the system and play the game for the sole purpose of enriching themselves, either with power or money–or both.
By and large, however, I think they play the game in an effort to serve well.
And often times serving well means, or can mean, parenting.
And by parenting I don’t mean that condition whereby one person labors out of love for the benefit of another. I mean instead, that the means of that love manifest themselves in creating rules and processes that bring about a desired result.
Lemme explain.
I my wife and I don’t negotiate expectations with the kids. Home work will be done. Clothes picked up. Chores done. Dinner eaten and in beds on time.
By and large those things are dictated. To be sure we compromise or enter into dialogue on the periphery; you can do your homework at the table or the desk. Bedtime can be a touch later on the weekends. But mostly, parenting is an exercise in identifying goals, developing strategies to get their and then practicing the discipline to encourage, and force, the kids to follow the plan.
Governing, I suspect, is often similar to parenting.
Except for one thing.
I’m not a child. I’m perfectly able to create my own value proposition and execute a plan that satisfies my own selfish self interests. Certainly, as a society, we’re able to each do that more perfectly that some commissar sitting in some mansion in any random capital; be it DC or [insert state here].
Which is why it’s so particularly disappointing to see this:
Calling it too big of a change to be done so quickly, Gov. Jan Brewer on Thursday vetoed legislation that could have left Arizonans unable to get insurance coverage for certain medical conditions or treatments.
Ms. Brewer had the opportunity to open the state of Arizona to insurance competition. She could have demonstrated to the nation that there are real world methods to lowering insurance costs. We don’t need some council on economics to meet in some locked room, write thousands of pages of nonsense in order to accomplish that. Just open the market and let it work.
Her reasons for the veto?
…the plan approved by lawmakers would have eliminated, in a single action, decades of individual decisions by prior legislatures about what should be included in a standard health insurance package offered for sale in Arizona.
Right. Because shitty ideas created over decades really SHOULD take decades to undo.
Some of these dangerous insideous things that are standard?
- [A] provision would have allowed insurers licensed by the state to drop specific mandated coverage if an out-of-state company doesn’t provide the mandated coverage in a policy issued in Arizona.
- Arizonans might not have adequate recourse under other states’ regulatory procedures if mistreated by out-of-state insurers.
- It [the bill] would leave some people without coverage for needed care.
This is the same drivel we get from the Obama administration. This whole concept that the state is the parent and the citizens are just snot nosed kids.
Truly disappointing.