The New York Times is reporting that many auto dealers have ended the Cash for Clunkers program before this mondays deadline. This may be why so many uninformed loud mouths have been screaming during healthcare debates with congress during the August recess. Sure, these two programs are unrelated, but the distrust people have in any government program leaks into any proposal that would add a new program to the populace.
Let me explain. I think the Cash for Clunkers program has been brilliant. In short, you get people to trade in cars that get bad gas mileage for cars that get good gas mileage. You remove guzzling and polluting cars from the road and people drive off in safe and more fuel efficient autos. The environment wins, car makers win, buyers win, dealers win. Opps, OK, maybe dealers don't win so much.
See, what has been happening is that dealers front the clunker traders the money to buy the new car and then send in a boatload of paperwork to some know-nothing DC plutocrat who cares less about paying out the billions owed to dealers. Keep in mind, many of the dealers have just barely been hanging on for the past year while the economy was almost flushed down the toilet by idiotic bankers and stock traders. So, the dealers did not have a lot of money to just loan out while waiting for the payback due from the government.
So, a fairly perfect program got laid low by the slow movements of some government hack who is making sure all the T's are crossed and the paperwork is read very closely. Anyone who has ever dealt with one of these self important knob-jobs knows that many in the government take particular pride in dragging out even the most simple process. It can be infuriating.
This is exactly where the healthcare debate gets bogged down by reality. I personally do not believe the healthcare industrial complex should be allowed to continue. The greed motives make it hard for any insurer to really care about the long term health of the insured. In fact, having gone through a long drawn out healthcare nightmare of my own, I an attest to the whims of an uneducated, non-medical office drone making important decisions on my life based solely on some accountants trickery.
So, when people talk about changes to the countries healthcare, if they had trust in government programs that work, they might be willing to listen to a plan that would save everyone money and insure everyone in a competent manner. But the problem is, as Cash for Clunkers has proven, is that given the chance, government officials are just as stupid and self serving as their private sector friends. Even a simple plan like giving dealers money for taking clunkers off the road became bogged down in red tape and silly paperwork. You know that the reams of paper that every dealer has had to fill out will just be thrown away in a month or so in some government dumpster.
Imagine if the Cash for Clunkers program had a website where dealers logged in, sent in the information on cars being traded in, vehicle identification numbers, pictures of the car and such, and then immediately the funds for that trade in were electronically transmitted to the dealers account. Imagine how happy everyone would be then. It would be a smart program. It would assure dealers and buyers that a smart program can work, quickly and efficiently. Instead, people and dealers grew frustrated by the paperwork and the lack of direction. Guess what? These same people could see the parallels of the healthcare plan running right alongside the clunkers program. Did you really want some DC shlub looking at your healthcare profile and making decisions based on his/her whimsy? No, and even though I detect the healthcare industrial complex like you can not imagine, the only thing worse would be the cash for clunkers mentality transposed onto the new healthcare committee in charge of who gets what.
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