ObamaCare Fantasies and Krauthammer Realities

We have been seduced by computer glamour …Glamour is a powerfully pervasive tool. Taken as a guide rather than the literal truth, it can lead to positive lifestyle action.  But it is also an illusion. In the real world hidden details matter.

Virginia Postrel, “Obama’s Virtual Fantasy Coludn’t Handle Messy Reality, Bloomberg, October 24, 2013

When you run something this large, it has no chance of succeeding.

Charles Krauthammer, MD (born 1950),  on Fox News video discussing Obamacare and healthcare.gov

Two fantasies have seduced President Obama..

One:  the government elite and its central planners know what’s best for people and can virtually manage their personal and health affairs.

Two:  the computer and its spin-offs is a  powerful and pervasive force capable of  managing society down to the last detail.

In his new book,  Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics,  Charles Krauthammer, MD, a political columnist  and a psychiatrist,  puts these two fantasies into perspective.

To begin with,  he says, it is important to get the politics right.  

In his book, he talks of his  journey from being  a life-long Democrat and  a Great Society liberal to a reluctant Reagan admirer to a contributor to Fox News and a commentator widely regarded as the most persuasive voice of American conservatism.  

He notes that he is not the first to make the journey from liberralism to conservatism..  Ronald Reagan,  Irving Kristol,  Pat Moynihan, and others made that same journey before him. 

He expresses his opinions in a weekly Washington Post column,  syndicated in 350 newspapers,  and in numerous talk shows, the most notable of which is a nightly Fox News appearance.

Krauthammer’s voice is not shrill.    It is pragmatic, reasonable,  empirical, nonpartisan.    He is simply saying that the Leviathan government model doesn’t work in the real world.    A more limited smaller government works better and is more in keeping with individual,  aspirations, skills, dreams, and freedoms.

He read widely before reaching these conclusions.  Though his reading and his own empirical observations,   he became slowly converted “ to a philosophy of restrained, free-market governance that gave more space and place to the individual and to the civil society that stands between citizen and state.” 

A  doctor,  graduated from  Harvard Medical School and trained as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he served as chief resident in Psychiatry  He regards the health care system  as a delicate ecosystem  developed over the course of 70 years. The professon,  he feels, is not capable of being overturned or transformed by federal mandates and bureaucratic regulations.

Tweet:   That healthcare.gov and other computer apps can transform medicine and that government knows best is fantasy now colliding with reality.