politics and "solving problems"

President Barack Obama has come out with a last ditch effort to pass something -- anything? -- in the way of healthcare reform legislation. This time around, it's regulating insurance rates.

The Heritage Foundation has observed:

In reality, there are a number of reasons why health insurers raise their rates, and so-called "insurer price-gouging" is one of the least likely causes. The biggest reason is growth in the price and volume of medical care that the plans pay for. If policyholders consume more medical care and/or if doctors and hospitals charge higher fees, then insurers must--obviously--raise their premiums to cover the added costs.

The chances of it passing are not much better this time around, probably because observers and elected officials, and pretty much everyone, see this "new" plan as basically more of the same from the president. The same $1,000,000,000,000 spent over the same ten years, to supposedly extend coverage to 31 million currently uninsured people. The Associated Press calls it "starting over," even though Obama himself has said that simply starting over was not going to happen.

The president called the upcoming healthcare reform summit a "test" of Washington's ability to "solve problems".

Obama often talks about "solving problems," which is common and by no means new in the liberal progressive vernacular. Stanford Economics professor and conservative political pundit Thomas Sowell has written a lot about this topic. Liberal progressives will often talk about "solving problems" categorically rather than incrementally. Sorry, English: solving a problem categorically means eliminating it completely. That's Obamacare. It's universal health coverage for everybody while driving down costs.

Sowell's point is that this view of problem-solving is dubious because it ignores the fact that the universe is limited -- that we have a finite amount of time and resources and a very long list of undesirable situations. The choice to solve a problem in the liberal vision is to essentially support the use of enormous amounts of time and resources (like 10 years and $1 trillion) to not solve a myriad of other problems.