Oh, and to use your other analogy, don't even get me started on the concept of the Federal and State governments efficiently handling road upkeep. I'm still laughing about a story regarding a highway near me, where the government wanted to patch a quarter mile path of an interstate. For those of you not good with numbers, let me give you a visual. You ever see the running track at one of your local schools? You know, where kids go out running for gym class? Well, a quarter mile is the SAME distance as running around the track ONCE. So it's not a big distance at all.
So, the Feds and the state decide they're going to repave this stretch of road because the winter weather tore it up a bit. And they price it out and they determine it's going to cost taxpayers $250,000 and the job will take about 60 days to do. Doesn't seem too bad, right?
Well, not till the construction unions stepped in and not till State and Federal agencies wanted to tweak this and then that, etc, etc, etc...
...At which point the simple $250,000 and 60 day job ended up costing and taking,
yes, wait for it because this is government "efficiency" at it's best...
...$5 MILLION and 2 YEARS to finish.
So, as I said before, I'm down with the idea of doing "something" to help the truly, truly, truly poor in the country, so they can get some kind of health assistance. Because even on a religious Christian level, I think that's the right thing to do -- to help those in true, true, true need. On the other hand, the notion that the Federal government can step in and efficiently run a universal healthcare system for all is SO laughable to me that it actually makes me want to cry. Simply because I can't believe...given ALL the historical precedents of ANY government run program OR after looking at the results of foreign national healthcare systems....that anyone would actually think a Federal bureaucracy can run ANYTHING right.
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