AN OLD (AND WISE) SOLUTION TO OUR FUTURE PROBLEMS

PRIVATE INITIATIVE AND HEALTH CARE

Last week, the President laid out a vision for a more self-reliant society. It was a bold undertaking, and it is the logical extension of the trajectory the American nation began on, before it got derailed by programs promoting dependency and entitlement.

The American Republic did not come to be because the colonies coddled their members from cradle to grave. The signers of the Declaration declared themselves independent; they didn't beg England to take better care of them, and they didn’t write a Constitution for a welfare state. The settlers of the West would never have made it to Oregon with the sense of entitlement modern Americans have now. People didn't expect their employers to give them generous pensions to retire--when the job ended, the pay ended, and the worker moved on. He didn't whine that the railroads or the tavern owners or the landowners didn't have any loyalty to him. He just plain left.

But by the end of the 20th century, we had come to the point where a disgruntled employee can sue his company for not firing him for a good enough reason. The idea we have today is that your employer somehow owes you a living--and vacations, paid holidays, a 401K, and unending loyalty. It doesn't matter how little loyalty most workers show to their employers these days. They still expect to be treated better than our grandparents were after 40 years of hard work and consistent service. Today a man who is fired for being chronically late for work claims disability because he has a psychological difficulty with punctuality.

Employers today--especially small businesses, where 70% of the new jobs come from--cannot afford the expectations of their workers. The Democrats' answer to job problems is to raise taxes on those businesses to pay for entitlement health care. What they don't seem to get is that part of why hiring slows down is that it costs a fortune to train a new employee and to set up the unemployment account for them--and then a fair number of them quit and move on. In an uncertain economy, such as post-9/11, employers would rather overwork the employees they have (hence the productivity numbers going through the roof) or hire temporary workers (letting the agency take the initial employee expense) than take a chance on hiring new ones.

What's more, when employers do hire, they don't want to start benefiting workers until they are sure those workers are going to stay. Thus, the availability of health care to workers varies with the time the worker is on the job. 45 million people don't have health care. Why not? No one ever seems to ask that question.

Part of it is because some people don't have full-time jobs--people who used to be considered stay-at-home moms and didn't appear in the "no health care" category because they were covered by a family plan. Those people today are considered without care because they are part-time workers, not covered by their own employer. Part of it is because people don't stay in jobs long enough to get health care. I know several people who have taken and quit at least 3 jobs in the past year, by their own choice. Each time, their employer prepares the mechanisms to put them on the insurance and then loses their entire investment in the employee.

Another, hopeful, factor is the surge of self-employment. Getting health care while self-employed is, to most people, complicated and difficult to understand. Starting a business is difficult enough without having to mess with that for one's self. Employees are covered, but often the boss is not. Millions of people have left the industrial work force for entrepreneurial self-employment--everything from making bumper stickers to selling Mary Kay and Pampered Chef--and they don't necessarily see the need for health coverage, especially if they have the option to be covered through a spouse. Then, too, even when spousal coverage is possible, most plans can only be entered or changed in certain months. If you find after signing up for it that your health care is inadequate to your needs, it is not unusual to have to wait up to a year to make a change in it (thus, many Americans are, in the Democrats' parlance, "under-insured.")

Then, too, there is the divorce question. Single moms often find themselves in years-long protracted battles over who is going to carry the health care coverage. Not infrequently, children are supposed to be covered by absent fathers, who spitefully quit coverage-carrying jobs to escape easing the burden on an ex-spouse (women do this, too; I don't mean to point the fingers just at fathers. Though it's clearly fathers who make up the bulk of those called "deadbeats."). Thus, we have another factor that complicates the matter and helps move those numbers higher.

Finally, while the Kerry camp trumpets the "45 million uninsured," he ought to address why it is that 40 million of them were already in that position by the end of the Clinton administration. Considering how many people change jobs, move from one job to another voluntarily, or even occasionally choose not to have health care because they don't want the premiums taken out of their check, it seems to me that the increase is modest, compared to what it might have been after 9/11.

As for the cost of health care, it is unlikely that Kerry and his doctor-suing buddy Edwards are going to be able to bring it down. Not while insurance plans cover drugs for male impotence, mild depression, seasonal affect disorder, allergies of various kinds, and the like. These maladies that we are bombarded with advertising about now didn't even exist a few years ago. People got allergies, they sneezed. People got depressed at the holidays, they ate ice cream and got over it. Don't even ask what men did when they had a "dysfunction." Now we are in such a therapeutic and over-medicated society that it is amazing that insurance companies can even afford to exist.

The president wants us to insure ourselves, with group plans that move with us from job to job. We wouldn’t be dependent on keeping the job we have to be insured. He wants us to be able to be the nomadic adventurers of the 21st century that our forebears set us up to be. Generation X employees and those who have come after already jump jobs much faster than their fathers or grandfathers did. They don't like to be tethered to a job, preferring projects to lifelong jobs--especially those who work in the IT field (for those unfamiliar with the hip lingo of the computer world, "IT" stands for "information technology," or what most of us think of as "computers.")

The President has read the culture exactly right. His plan is perfect for IT specialists, self-employed entrepreneurs, internet businesses, home sales, and the vast majority of new employment that has been generated over the past few decades. During those same years, we have bled manufacturing jobs profusely, because manufacturing is increasingly automated, requiring either little work (which employers are loathe to pay union wages for) or increasingly complicated (requiring technology degrees that the union laborers usually don’t have.)

It might sound good on the Democratic stump, but a last-ditch effort to save the manufacturing sector is a fool's errand. Pat Buchanan may shriek, but outsourcing manufacturing jobs is the smartest move for the American economy. We have come to a point where Americans should be doing "thinking" jobs whenever possible, importing goods at cheap prices and providing highly valuable and technical services. Making furniture is no more salvageable in this day and age than small farms are--or the horse-drawn carriage was when the car came in.

President Bush realizes that many, especially in the manufacturing sector, aren't ready for that yet--largely because of the mess the Democrats have made of the educational system. But he believes that we can change that, too. That's what the job training is about. That's what the No Child Left Behind standards are about. His vision is to train Americans to live in the 21st century, not the 20th. The Democrats can't see beyond their petty special interests. The unions are terrified of becoming extinct. In an independent work force, each employee owns his own job. He negotiates his own contract. He doesn't need a union, and he doesn’t need lawyers to sue employers for jobs he has the luxury to leave.

The Democrats want to shout down the president's plan for his second term. They have to. If he wins, they lose more than an election; they lose their very reason for being.