"State bureaucrats will be smarter than federal? because they're "decentralized"?"
"Smarter"? Why would they need to be "smarter"? They just need to analyze a business plan just like any other bank would (which is why I propose a "credit union" style of management and disbursement), but you're saying it will be rife with waste and fraud. I disagree, and can name this very network upon which we disagree as just one counterexample of a government funded program (centralized at that!) that works, and that likely would've never happened without soul-crushing R&D and deployment expenditure from a cabal of private network competitors. In other words, it wouldn't have happened, from the "session" OSI layer back to physical. I can also name other government developments (Polio elimination, Interstate System, Railroad, hell even the USPS up until about 4 years ago) that made America the engine of the world economy; but it belabors the point and you'll just disagree anyway.
"Healthy people will pay premium for a program that will take them at any time? C'mon man, really?"
They will if they can get a discount over Blue Cross for similar coverage. Why do you think people shop at Wal-Mart? Because of the happy faces?
You say you're all about business, try this exercise real quick: go and see how much it would cost to get coverage for a four-person startup through a private insurer (remember, get like for like coverage) vs. premiums for Medicare. See the difference? Now calculate it if one of the four has/had cancer. Not so fun.
"I just don't understand why such brilliant people are so routinely taken with "solutions" of a pattern they wouldn't tolerate for 15 seconds in their work"
Your design pattern, if I can suss it out from your comment about "equality" and "fairness" and "educating everyone", is that you want simple human nature/nurture to win out against educating all children (even and especially corner cases like poor and problemed ones).
"So we don't go for the central, systemic problems of the main program, we write scads of bug-catching programs to sit atop them and intercept the bugs. That would never work in code, and it won't work for government."
First, comparing educating children to bug-catching programs is asinine on it's face; secondly, there are a number of successful companies out there that have legacy code to maintain that is rife with bugs. Not only that, this code often can't even be read let alone maintained by anyone but a single person that the company then has to continually shovel money at to keep them from leaving. Wall St., the insurance industry (go figure since we're talking healthcare!), hell even the two most successful technology companies on planet earth by any measure (Microsoft and Apple) maintain buggy legacy code for ages. It's in fact, rare that they throw out the entire system. Yet, you want to do that for a country with 75 million kids.
You don't know anything about what I would or wouldn't do, because I'm focussed here on how we think about the problem.
If you think our current educational system "works", then why is it that our economic problems are poor worker preparation and inflexible attitudes about work?
If you are satisfied with how you're thinking about all this, I can't change that. Maybe sometime, when you're wondering why everyone is so stupid / evil that they can't see the brilliance of boosting small businesses with $10bn annual subsidy and their own single payer health system, you'll consider that maybe something along these lines helps explain the disconnect.
BTW, suggesting that the Postal Service was some kind of economic accelerator until 4 years ago is just ignorant. Their productivity is terrible, UPS & FedEx kicked their ass decades ago. They should have been relegated to rural / remote universal service, and the rest privatized, a long time ago. Think about why they weren't and you'll go a long way to understanding why political entities make lousy economic decisions.
"Smarter"? Why would they need to be "smarter"? They just need to analyze a business plan just like any other bank would (which is why I propose a "credit union" style of management and disbursement), but you're saying it will be rife with waste and fraud. I disagree, and can name this very network upon which we disagree as just one counterexample of a government funded program (centralized at that!) that works, and that likely would've never happened without soul-crushing R&D and deployment expenditure from a cabal of private network competitors. In other words, it wouldn't have happened, from the "session" OSI layer back to physical. I can also name other government developments (Polio elimination, Interstate System, Railroad, hell even the USPS up until about 4 years ago) that made America the engine of the world economy; but it belabors the point and you'll just disagree anyway.
"Healthy people will pay premium for a program that will take them at any time? C'mon man, really?"
They will if they can get a discount over Blue Cross for similar coverage. Why do you think people shop at Wal-Mart? Because of the happy faces?
You say you're all about business, try this exercise real quick: go and see how much it would cost to get coverage for a four-person startup through a private insurer (remember, get like for like coverage) vs. premiums for Medicare. See the difference? Now calculate it if one of the four has/had cancer. Not so fun.
"I just don't understand why such brilliant people are so routinely taken with "solutions" of a pattern they wouldn't tolerate for 15 seconds in their work"
Your design pattern, if I can suss it out from your comment about "equality" and "fairness" and "educating everyone", is that you want simple human nature/nurture to win out against educating all children (even and especially corner cases like poor and problemed ones).
"So we don't go for the central, systemic problems of the main program, we write scads of bug-catching programs to sit atop them and intercept the bugs. That would never work in code, and it won't work for government."
First, comparing educating children to bug-catching programs is asinine on it's face; secondly, there are a number of successful companies out there that have legacy code to maintain that is rife with bugs. Not only that, this code often can't even be read let alone maintained by anyone but a single person that the company then has to continually shovel money at to keep them from leaving. Wall St., the insurance industry (go figure since we're talking healthcare!), hell even the two most successful technology companies on planet earth by any measure (Microsoft and Apple) maintain buggy legacy code for ages. It's in fact, rare that they throw out the entire system. Yet, you want to do that for a country with 75 million kids.