Public services are not supposed to be an engine for enriching the few at the expense of the many.

I've been reading more about the ongoing legal battle over the "Obamacare" bill, and the controversial way it attempted to address universal health care. How did this thing ever manage to pass as written? It's basically forcing everyone to pay private, for-profit companies for insurance when it's not insurance that people need, it's the care itself. Insurance companies must have written this law themselves and just sent it over to their pals in government to be rubber stamped. To hell with that. Where's our NHS?

There's this thing called Control Fraud that comes to mind:
"Control fraud occurs when a trusted person in a high responsible position in a company, corporation or state uses their powers to subvert the company and to engage in extensive fraud for personal gain."

Put simply, "the best way to rob a bank is to own one". Bill Black has written extensively about this problem. If you're at all interested in it, you'll want to check out his articles and video interviews, which are all easy to find online for free. They mostly focus on banking and financial fraud and related crime, but once you understand how dysfunctional things can get it's easy to spot similar patterns elsewhere.

Laws like this and the various state laws requiring vehicle insurance are the worst possible way to go about achieving their supposed goals. The insurance industry has captured the lawmaking and regulatory process and used their influence to pervert programs designed for the public good (universal health care, protection against car accidents) into a way to force every US citizen to give them money whether they want to or not.

You could argue that anyone who really doesn't want to pay for car insurance can just opt not to own a car, but in the US it's damned near impossible outside of urban areas and that choice is an illusion. Believe me, I've tried: 10 months without a car in Mountain View, CA (SF bay) proved that I was only able to pull it off because I could still bum rides when I had to. I didn't even end up saving money in the end because I have a 2 mile commute, I already didn't drive many days, and the DMV in California finds ways to charge you money even if your cars are declared non-operational. It was a hollow victory for me and an imposition on my friends. Thankfully they were good sports about it.

So if everyone is required by law to have liability insurance when they drive a car, then why call it insurance? British Columbia, Canada has a state-run insurance company, but that's still a lack of imagination. Remember that it's not the insurance that people need, it's the service itself. Then throw out everything you take for granted about the way things currently work and think of a solution that addresses precisely that need.

If I were in charge, I'd just have the state pay the damages on everyone's accidents, tally up the costs at the end of the year, divide that net cost evenly by the number of licensed drivers, and assess a fee in that amount on every driver next time they want to renew. Identical cost of repairs minus the profits and operating costs of the insurance companies == lower cost per driver. Adjust the formula to account for the number of times the state has had to pay out for your accidents before in the past 3 years or whatever so that unsafe drivers have to pay a higher license renewal fee, and you have a textbook market solution to this problem. People will be safe for fear of being unable to afford to renew their license. Set a cap on the number of payouts before automatic revocation so that rich people can't just "afford" to be dangerous idiots on the road, and now it's regulated market capitalism. Allow people to buy private insurance policies on top of whatever the state provides so that if you have a special need and the money to pay for it, you can have all the coverage that an insurer is willing to sell you (Australia and others do this for socialized medicine; private insurance/care is still available to anyone who wants to pay extra to get it).

There's no more uninsured motorist problem. Now, it's collapsed into solely an unlicensed driver problem. It's a lot easier for the cops and the DMV to quickly identify unlicensed drivers and not have to keep track of who's uninsured, so their jobs are easier. The licensed driver has much less to keep track of personally: just one bill per year, no insurance company to deal with, less correspondence with the DMV.

Simplicity and elegance always pay dividends in quality of life, which is why socialized medicine and my proposal for socialized auto liability are so appealing. Even ignoring the cost in dollars, it's the cost in time, human time, that's critical. The fewer man-hours patients or drivers spend getting what they need out of the system, and the fewer man-hours required to administer that system from the other side, the more man-hours there are now available for anything and everything else. Anyone who cries that the insurance industry is a major employer, contributes to GDP, etc., is missing the point and not using their imagination. Digging roots and picking berries was an occupation that employed the whole human race at one time; later, making flint spearheads; later still, making horseshoes. These professions' passing into obsolescence is to be celebrated as progress, freeing humans from a task so that they can explore and invent.

Anyone who claims that we've reached the point where freeing humans from their toil automatically means rising unemployment from here until the system collapses is also not using their imagination, but I'll forgive that because the solutions are so hard to see and hear through the noise of people saying what's not possible. The next leap is to a favorite subject of mine called MMT, which I'll discuss at length in the next post.