Why health, education, and finance are issues we rationalize

The health care crisis, education crisis and the financial crisis have a number of similarities. At the root is a general consensus that the problems are caused by someone else with the frequent target being business of one type or the other. Rarely do we focus on the real causes because they make us uncomfortable and place responsibility where we don’t want it.

In health care and education we blame portions of the system, but are generally unable to temper our quest for the best with the realities of what actually constitutes the best. That is, more is better, high cost equals high quality. In education that goes from pre/school through college. We blame teachers and administrators and ignore the responsibility of the family. We accept growing costs for local education and for college without questioning the added value or the sources of those costs. The same is true for health care. Our judgement is clouded by our emotional inability to deal with illness in any context of cost and to some extent even quality. It is far easier to simply blame the insurance industry than to protest high infection rates in hospitals or to question the necessity of care. In both education and health care our solution is frequently to throw more money at the problem, yet we seem to be unable to recognize that when the bill comes due.

When it comes to finance, we have easy targets, big business and big banks and we gloss over the damage caused by politicians in their quest for fairness, control or simply their favoritism. Who caused the mortgage crisis, who put people into homes they could never afford, who wants to bail out those folks now?  Banks may have taken advantage of the environment, but it was created by politicians who per the norm, ignored the unintended consequences of their actions.

This all boils down to human nature.  Politicians play on that fact while at the same time are blind to the consequences of doing so (or more cynically, don’t care).

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