The story of my job search?

"He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others." - William Hazlitt

(Quoted in Alan Jacob's review of a Hazlitt biography.)

Home Alone / Saw.

Today my brother messed up some childhood memories by observing that the first two Home Alone movies should be thought of as prequels to the Saw films.

Honestly, in the second one, Kevin McAllister is pretty much a Jigsaw in training.

Caring about health care.

Everybody's talking about health care at the League, but I'm so ignorant in this area I don't want to post my insubstantial, probably obvious opinions over there. On the other hand, I'd like to put them somewhere for the record, so here they are:

1. There's something wrong. You need insurance if you don't want long-term treatment for sickness to be impossibly expensive, but insurance itself is complicated and expensive, and (according to what I've picked up from the news) tens of millions of people either don't have it or don't have enough. This is a very bad situation.
   
2. The system in place now is an enormously complicated regulated market. The government's already involved to the point where it makes no sense to call the medical treatment system a free market system.
3. If something has to change, it could happen in three ways, broadly speaking. First, the government could make definite steps reducing regulation and letting health care be more of a market system. Second, the government could remain committed to something like our current level of regulation while trying new regulatory schemes. Third, the government could become more active, whether that means a public option or something more ambitious.
4. There's no way we're going the free-market route. It's cynical to say so, but I'd anticipate that the only “free-market” reforms that could get through our sluggish system would be the ones that insurance or pharmaceutical companies find to be to their advantage. Furthermore, free-market health care exists only in theory as far as I can tell. And under this administration, it's immaterial anyway, unless some super-Reagan appears before the next election. So from this citizen's perspective, a free-market health care system isn't politically possible, nobody in power really wants to do it, and we don't know for sure that it would even work in reality. In short, you can't get there from here.
   
5. If the Republicans have their way, we'll probably stay with some version of the status quo: some comparable kind of regulation that doesn't address the very real problem of people being un- or under-insured. Gingrich and company will, as usual, come up with some interesting ideas that could do something about the people that our system leaves out, but since the base is apparently frightened of changes in their health care policies, will the Republicans ever make health care reform a major priority?
6. And so I'd actually like to see the third option: the government gets more involved. It seems like this is the kind of thing that should be happening when it's a major goal of the party that controls both houses and the Presidency. I guess it's the parliamentarian in me that thinks that when the people vote for a party, that should be expected to get its way in policy until the next election. Alas, we've got these mechanisms for obstruction.
7. If the government's obliged to ensure that citizens have a basic level of education, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think the government's obliged to ensure that citizens can get medicine and treatment for injuries and sickness. Now, I reserve some suspicions about the education-obligation on a theoretical level, but it seems like we basically buy that a democracy is better off if the citizens are educated, and that the government has some role in providing that education. It seems like a pretty simple extension to say that a democracy is better off if the citizens are healthy, and that the government has some role in ensuring the availability of treatment and medicine. (One could question the validity of this extension in that education is provided for children — i.e., proto-citizens — whereas adults should be expected to manage their own health insurance.)
8. During the election, I noticed that President Obama sells his style of government action as structures of regulation within which market forces are harnessed so that the government has direction over the range of outcomes while avoiding as many Soviet-style inefficiencies as possible. As I said, I'm way ignorant here and I haven't even tried to assess whether the plans really do this. If any of them really take this approach, I'd love to see it work out, as it would confirm some of Etzioni's arguments in The Moral Dimension.
9. It's not an article of faith for me that government is necessarily worse than private enterprise in every arena of activity. But even if I did believe that, it wouldn't follow that a stronger government/market hybrid is necessarily worse than a weaker government/market hybrid. In this case, I'm inclined to believe that the stronger government/market hybrid is better than the weak one.

All this is to say that this citizen hopes the Democrats can find a way to get a functioning health-care reform bill in line with their general goals through the mire of our political system. The problems they're trying to solve are so serious that sometimes I think there's some saner parallel universe where the policies the Democrats are pursuing are considered cautious and incrementalist in comparison to the radical overhaul that some sizeable minority of citizens are demanding…

As I said, though, I'm not up-to-date or well-informed on anything that's going on right now. The real world keeping me busy and all that. You know.