"Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare!"

One of the problems with democratic decision making is that lots of the people who care a lot about the results, and vote for the people who make the decisions, aren't smart enough to have any idea what they are doing. The quote above, from a constituent at a Republican town meeting, illustrates the problem.

As Krugman notes, in the blog post that is the source of the quote above, "we already have a system in which the government pays substantially more medical bills (47% of the total) than the private insurance industry (35%)." Medicare is, of course, a socialized, taxpayer funded, government single payer system for those age sixty-five and older in the United States, and the largest single source of government health care spending.