I had a strange and vivid dream last night.

We were all in a room and the man stood up to tell us we would be voting for who would be the king of Switzerland. The family of whoever won would be royalty and that would settle the matter for the small, land locked country of who would be in charge forever. I stood up and asked why there couldn’t be a president. I argued in front of everyone that a president doesn’t take everyone’s money and spend it for him and people he wants to spend it on. A president is a good steward of the people’s hard earned money.

The guy announcing our vote said there would be no president on the ballot, only kings. People started lining up to vote, ignoring me, but I shouted louder saying that we should write on the ballot that there should be a vote to decide if Switzerland should be a democracy, not a kingdom. I said that if we’re voting for a king, we’re already acting like a democracy. The guy said we must have a king, no presidents and no elections after this first one.

I spoke to a gal in line who said if there’s royalty, then there will be more trade between Switzerland and other countries and people coming would be here for vacation to buy trinkets. She was poor and wanted the economy to do better and thought that having a king would do this.

I couldn’t understand why people wanted to vote for a king and then never vote again for a president and just let the king do whatever he wants with the money and taxes. Then I woke up.

On a completely unrelated note, there is no health care crisis in America. We have extremely good health care and relatively excellent survival rates for serious diseases like cancer. We have a crisis of health care costs. Ours are too high. What can government do about this?

Government cannot generate money, it can only spend money (printing more dollars devalues all others currently in existence leaving the sum total of American wealth the same as before). It cannot magically generate the right amount of money out of thin air to pay for healthcare, although sometimes it seems like Obama and the current Congress believes it can.
Government also cannot magically reduce the cost of something. It can artificially reduce the cost of health care premiums, for example, but the same total price as before will be paid somewhere (by someone) in the economy.

This inability of government to reduce the cost of something goes with a caveat, of course. The government can reduce the actual cost of health care by forcing a reduction in its quality. Health care will cost less if it is mandated to be worse in some ways. For example, if there is some kind of rationing in some way (which would be any type of restricted access to any part of health care) then there will obviously be less costs incurred. Naturally the difficult part is determining how much and what parts of health care must be restricted and whether that will reduce the costs enough.

There are options besides “rationing.” Though my understanding is that this is not currently a part of either the House or Senate bill, tort reform could reduce costs by having doctors perform less tests and less “defensive medicine.” These tests are often called superfluous, but doubtless there have been times they have saved lives. Not all, perhaps not even most malpractice suits are frivolous (I wouldn’t pretend to know what percentage). But reducing these tests will necessarily be a reduction in quality.