If Massachusetts holds itself out as an example of trying to improve individual access to affordable health care, North Carolina should serve as a warning.
Belying its free marketplace balogna, NC has huge numbers of governmental employees who enjoy superior health benefits to all the individuals being told to go it alone in the "free" marketplace.
This year, after a fiasco of misreporting the dollars available to the state workers health plan, NC has done nothing to suspend this freebie for government workers and NC citizens, facing the questionable distinction of having one of the worst unemployment rates in the country, will watch as the State does anything, including raising various taxes to preserve this freebie for government workers while failing to generate real growth in the private sector.
NC represents the worse of both worlds: Public verbiage of the "free market" and real action that shows a bureaucracy that is sustaining itself by cannibalizing its citizens.
Our national dialog MUST address government's tendency to grow itself and protect itself at the expense of working and in this case non-working Americans. The failure to address the gross differences between benefits provided to governmental employees dooms efforts to change our "paradigm" because those in government are trying to preserve what they have instead of addressing what more and more citizens do not have which is a representative government's job.
