Hawaii Ends Universal Child Health Care ... Just 7 Months After It Began!

Here's a news story from Hawaii that is important for all Canadians to read. The state decided to launch a health care program intended to help less fortunate children. But being universal, there was no means test, so anyone was eligible. Sure enough, more well-off families followed the rules and started registering their children too:

"People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free," said Dr. Kenny Fink, the administrator for Med-QUEST at the Department of Human Services. "I don't believe that was the intent of the program."

Duhhhh! I've never understood why government bureaucrats construct the rules of every program with the assumption that everyone will be noble. Instead they should always assume that some people will try to scam the system and design the rules accordingly.

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Incidentally, precisely the same misuse has occurred with the Quebec Day Care program. As per socialist dogma, it was made universal from Day One. So people from all social strata applied. Mothers driving BMW and Mercedes automobiles began dropping off their young children every morning. But because there was a fixed budget of about $2 Billion per year set aside for the program, not all children could be admitted into the $7 per day program. So there were single moms making $30,000 a year working at multiple blue-collar jobs who couldn't admit their children while wealthy women living in million dollar homes had theirs taken care of.

Just an example of the brilliance of centralized planning in the government. :-(