Wikipedia: “Hair of the dog is a colloquial English expression predominantly used to refer to ingestion of alcohol as treatment for a hangover. It is occasionally used with respect to dealing with the after effects of use of other recreational drugs.”
As I’ve already said, I agree that our health care system in this country is dysfunctional—it’s inefficient, uncompetitive, too expensive, too unaccountable, and not at all transparent. Unfortunately, we have a bunch of politicians (to whom the whole thing is personally irrelevant since they have a superb taxpayer-funded health care plan which won’t be affected at all by anything they pass) whose desire is to solve these problems by feeding it the hair of the dog: making our healthcare system even more inefficient, uncompetitive, expensive, unaccountable, and opaque by adding a vast new tangle of government bureaucracy to the existing vast tangle of government bureaucracy that’s already gumming up the works. If you haven’t seen the organizational chart for this, it’s beyond belief:
If you’re wondering how that will function in practice, here’s a working model:
HT: Aaron Gardner
One of the great problems with a government-centric approach to “reforming” health care is almost theological, the same problem the early church had with the Pharisees (and the church has had throughout the centuries with those who would rather live by law than by grace): if you try to define and control anything through law, then you need a law for every bit of minutiae. This is is why government control is never the most efficient way to run anything, because it’s impossible to fine-tune the law well enough to make it truly efficient; it’s why government control stifles innovation, because all those laws lock innovation down. It’s also why, whatever the overarching principle of any law might be, the devil is always in the details.
As the above organizational chart shows, the details of the current Democratic health care bill are myriad, complicated, and confusing; and as a closer examination of some of those details shows, for this bill, they add up to a mighty big devil. Check out the Economic Policy Journalblog for a list that may very well curl your hair, including a massive expansion of government incursion into individual rights and economic freedom. Then consider that while one of the other big factors driving up the cost of healthcare is runaway litigation, this bill won’t do anything to rein that in—in fact, it will expand it. (HT: Mark Hemingway)
This is the kind of reasoning James Hirsen dubbed “Bidenomics” after our ever-quotable vice president told the AARP,
AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable. It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially. We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation. Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’ The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.
It doesn’t really deserve its own name, though, because it’s not new to VP Biden at all; it’s the same old folk logic of the hair of the dog: to fix a problem, just pile on lots more of what created the problem to begin with. Apply it to drinkers, you get drunks, who then use it to justify becoming worse drunks. Now, a government drunk on tax money and a political party supported in large part by trial-lawyers drunk on lawsuit money are using it to try to justify getting even drunker. We need to tell them to sober up.