George will has targeted two democratic groups that have contributed to the impediment of the Republican ideology: trial lawyers and unions. Trial lawyers are the scapegoats for runaway health costs, though it affects less than one percent of the spiraling escalation. Unions, though on the decline in general, are substantially healthy in the governmental sector.
Will’s contention is that most of the work done by government — federal, state and local — could be performed by private contractors. This, of course, would include public education as well, which, he claims, generates a greater per-pupil cost than the private education that precludes union representation. Obviously Will does not bother to defend the higher costs of private universities as opposed to state institutions; nor does it stir him into checking out the number of defense contractors that are unionized — after all, national defense is sacrosanct. In addition, Will is not concerned with stats that may show that a well-fed army of government employees enhances a thriving economy by greater middle class consumption that is not hindered by individual costs of health insurance plaguing most of the private sector. And if there were massive cuts in the numbers of government employees, where would they go? — to the unproductive rolls of unemployment insurance. It is obvious that Will in opposition the Democratic Party is bent on diminishing the middle class by the presumed “on the cheap” private industries primarily obsessed with building a lower and higher class at the expense of those in the middle.
Trial lawyers, admittedly motivated by profiteering rather than championing the little guy in distress, nonetheless do, with the help of a jury, empower victims of blatant incompetence. Isolated incidents such as the old lady that burned her herself with MacDonald’s coffee is unquestionably absurd but could never make the cut of today’s frivolous test. Small business owners with insurance should only be sightly more wary of lawsuits than a private homeowner. The real problem is in the insurance companies themselves that are fraught with high deductibles and unreasonable cushioned premiums dedicated to the preservation of an excessively profitable bottom line. Return on the dollar from government taxes far exceed the bang for the buck that policy holders get from high liability insurance costs. Health insurance costs come from the exaggerated hysteria on the part of hospitals and physicians when they engage in unnecessary defensive medicine under the fearful pretense of litigation, admitting, as it were, to wholesale malpractice. The patent view, not the perception, is that overwhelmingly malpractice is undetected.
George Will also infers that conservatives are whetting their appetite for growing self-reliance as the aging population of the New Deal and WW II disappears from the face of the earth so that laissez-faire can be brush off and touched up with a new rugged face.
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: October 12, 2004.
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