More Political Polarization to Come

Shannon Love has a great post today about the decomparmentalization of health care being proposed by President Obama. Here's a relevant bit to my previous post discussing how growth in government leads to a growth in political strife.

With Obamacare, (health care compartmentalization into Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance) will change. The walls of the financial compartments will crumble. All medical spending for everyone will come out of one big financial pot. Suddenly, health-care spending will become zero-sum. Spending more on the elderly or the poor will automatically mean spending less on middle-class families and vice versa. Middle-class families won’t be able to accommodate increased spending on the elderly by trimming other parts of the family budget. Even if middle-class people pay more taxes into the entire system, politicians will always have to balance spending those increased taxes on the elderly and poor against the needs of middle-class families.

With Obamacare, medical spending will be like baking one pie for three siblings. If one sibling gets a bigger piece that automatically means the other two siblings get smaller pieces. The one-pie system has a built-in automatic source of conflict.

Maybe I'm looking at this all wrong. Maybe this is a chance to bring together various factions of the country into a single group. Imagine what would happen if the poor and the middle class ganged up on the elderly. More harmony for all!

Well, err, more harmony for 2/3 of us ...