Government Pilot Programs for Health Care and Welfare Proved Disastrous

One of the things we are missing today is a predominance of representatives that perform as they speak. Our founding fathers, for the most part, were selfless and governed "for the people" and did not use their position for personal gain or power. A majority of our current day politicians are in it for themselves. They have managed to legislate extreme perks for themselves that make it difficult to give up. Hence, they vote for what they believe to be vote getting measures regardless of what the "pilot programs" and common sense say.

This article mentions the results of two such programs and their prophetic disastrous effects after being enacted by an uncaring self serving Congress.

Excerpt: How do you know when they (politicians) are ready to throw in the towel and grasp at any last desperate hope — no matter how fleeting, no matter how far-fetched?

Answer: They start a pilot program.

Did you know that before there was a modern welfare state, the federal government actually did a test run? Called the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiment (SIME/DIME), they guaranteed the participants a minimum income, regardless of their wages or marital status. The results were stunning — at least stunning to the research community. Once couples realized they didn’t have to stay together for economic reasons, large numbers of them split up. Think about that. Before the welfare state created all the tragedy and the social pathology and dysfunctionality that we are living with today, federal government planners knew in advance what was going to happen!

The other interesting multimillion dollar experiment was conducted by the RAND Corporation. This project created another notable result. People with high deductible insurance (about $2,500 at today’s prices) spent about one-third less on health care without any adverse affects on their health. Think about that. Almost thirty years before Medicare Part D created first-dollar coverage for drugs and PPACA created first-dollar coverage for preventive care we knew that first-dollar coverage for anything in health care creates huge amounts of waste!

Both these experiments reveal two important things about pilot programs: (1) it is possible to spend an enormous amount of money to learn something ordinary people with an ounce of common sense (people without PhDs) probably could have told us anyway and (2) no matter what we discover, politicians are likely to do what is politically expedient for them to do in any event. Health Alert | Pilot Programs by John Goodman