The Moral of the Story is The Moral is Wrong

The story of King Midas is told to every child. Midas, as you know, loved gold so much that he wanted to be able to turn anything into gold by touching it. Be careful what you wish for. Midas received that ability and looked forward to have more gold than anyone else. Walt Disney took that idea—the love of gold—and created the character of Donald Duck's rich uncle, Scrooge McDuck. Uncle Scrooge had a swimming pool full of gold and delighted in diving into it and literally swimming in the stuff.

Swimming in gold may look like fun in a comic strip, but we know that real aquatic fun comes from swimming in clear water. The legendary King Midas learned that you can get pretty hungry when your mouth-watering meal turns into sold gold the instant you touch it. Supposedly, the lesson to be learned from these stories is that greed is bad.

But that is not true at all. Every successful man or woman is greedy. Greedy for good grades in school. Greedy for success in a profession. Greedy for the best life possible for their loved ones. The saintly Mother Theresa was greedy for saved souls.

The real lesson is that money, in the form of gold or otherwise is just a medium of exchange and has value only in terms of what you can do with it. We all know that, but somehow we keep forgetting. One of the more controversial problems we face is how to best provide quality health care to everyone who needs it.

We had such a system once. Medical care was affordable, doctors spent time with their patients, hospitals were non-profit, and no one was asked to provide proof of insurance before treatment in emergency rooms. There was a downside. There were no billionaire executives running giant managed care enterprises and those that headed large pharmaceutical firms had to be satisfied to be merely rich rather than super rich.

Employees of midsize to large corporations typically had insurance that covered major medical costs and no one thought to demand coverage that paid for a doctor's $5 house call. Well that's all history. The medical field is filled with highly profitable enterprises. Doctors now head teams of "practitioners" and rarely know much about a patient's medical history. They can look that up on their tablet computer during the five minutes or so they spend with the patient. The old prescription pad with its scribbled Latin notes is gone. Doctors have no time to write prescriptions. That's done by their staff, based on computer data.

Pharmacists have changed too. No longer required to compound medications from basic ingredients, they simply fill and label pill bottles. That gives them more time to catch the all-too-common mistakes on prescriptions printed out by medical staff personnel. They also back up the drug enforcement guys by helping to catch those buying more painkillers than their doctors knowingly prescribed.

Something is terribly wrong with the business of medical care, but undoing that might be a bit complex. Not only that, but the companies profiting most from the current mess are those that give the most money to elected officials to help keep them in office.

The politically acceptable solution is to take the outrageous costs and exorbitant profits in the medical field as a given and limit debate to how to pay for it.  A key part of the current plan is to make health insurance mandatory. This of course, will create a bonanza for the health insurance industry. Young, healthy people are the least likely to pay large premiums for health insurance. Now they'll be forced to.

The point is that when you have a system that is in trouble, first try to fix it. Only when you know how to fix it should you be looking for more funds.

Closely linked to the so-called healthcare crisis is the issue of rights. You've seen the posters: "Healthcare is a human right."

Once upon a time humans had the right to do anything that did not injure others and of course nothing that interfered with the identical rights of others. We know that unlike monkeys, tigers, and frogs, humans need property to survive. So logically, rights over things we produce are basic to the survival of human beings.

But those rights are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In New York City, a young woman recently spent two nights in jail for the crime of not carrying her wallet. Did you ever see those black and white movies of the forties, where Nazi officers would board trains and demand "papers" from passengers. No papers could mean imprisonment or death. We thought that could never happen here.

But for a time after World War II, we had offenses like "failure to give a good account of yourself" or " no visible means of support." Some of these cases ended up in court and for a long time we were proud to be free Americans once more. We could even cross the borders of friendly nations with no more difficulty than entering California from Nevada. We had real rights.

Somewhere along the line, that changed. Now we no longer have a guarantee of basic rights. In their place we enjoy new rights. If medical care is a human right then so must be food, clothing, and shelter.

Once the necessities of life were shared with the deprived out of a sense of justice and generosity. Think of all the charitable foundations bearing the names of the so-called "robber barons" of the past.

Now we assume that no one helps anyone else unless forced to by law. The assumption is that no one is responsible for his neighbor because that's the government's job. And then there is the idea that accepting help from a friend or neighbor is degrading, but receiving the same assistance from neighbors who have been forced to cough up the money by the government, which then passes on help extracted by force is not degrading but is a human right.

 Education is, of course, a basic right with a catch; to enjoy that right, most of us must assume a lifetime of debt.

Today schooling is the only kind of education that carries any weight. My own father started out as a low-paid turret lathe operator. Then he bought a book called "Blueprint Reading Made Easy." Next, working as s detailer, someone who produced mechanical drawings of simple parts, he developed the skills of a full-fledged draftsman who could produce drawings of complex machinery. Finally he developed the skill needed to design machinery. All this with only a high school diploma.

If you've ever gone bowling, the pins you knock over are reset by a machine which is the direct descendant of the first pin setting machine that Dad helped to design.Today, such a job is only available to those             available to those willing to assume tens of thousands of dollars in debt to acquire the documentation necessary to meet employer requirements.

Employers like this system. In the old days they had to make judgments about the skills and potential of the men and women they hired. That's a tough job. Now they can slough off that responsibility to a human resource department headed by someone with a human resource degree that supposedly qualifies them to hire engineers and scientists while knowing little or nothing of science and engineering themselves.