Our government education system may be the model for Obama’s health care plan. Geoffrey P. Hunt at American Thinker gives us a glimpse of what to expect on the road to institutionalized mediocrity. Although a substandard education may harm your chances at success in life, substandard medical care may cost you your life.

Much of the speculation around Obama’s health care reform centers around a single payer government monstrosity resembling either a larger bankrupt Medicare platform or the discredited national health schemes in Canada or the UK.  Yet it’s just as likely Obama’s inspiration is the failed public school model.

The government school monopoly, compulsory with mediocre results, unaffordable and ungovernable with beleaguered local taxpayers hopelessly unable to force accountability from teachers’ unions co-dependent with democrat party legislators, is a perfect model for Obama to finance and ration health care for the masses…

In a seductive overture to private health plan stalwarts, Obama says the government health care system will not be a mandatory substitute for private health care preferences, only an option. Of course those who remain in a private system will face double jeopardy  – covering their own private medical costs while suffering higher federal taxes to pay for somebody else’s — in the same manner that private school parents, opting out of horrible local public schools for far better independent alternatives, must pay private school tuition while still shouldering ever escalating property and state income taxes to educate those poor wretches who cannot escape the government’s incompetence.

Those who cannot afford private health care, whose employers would rather pay higher taxes instead of underwriting actual medical claims, will also be victimized just as parents with no choice have to send their children to lousy government schools. Want to see what demotivated clock watchers — doctors and nurses alike - In a government run clinic would look like? Just spend a few hours in a typical public high school faculty lounge.  Want to see what government hospital administrators consumed by micro-management of trivialities would look like? Just spend a few hours at a typical Public School Board or School Committee meeting.

And who would thwart the temptations for the government health care bureaucrats to regulate medical care provided by private institutions who accept federal grants for medical research?  Check out the hostility towards home schoolers these days from State Boards of Education. And given the enthusiasm shown by Congressman Barney Frank and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner alike for government control over compensation of executives running government financed private companies, why wouldn’t they have an equally big appetite to regulate pay and benefits for doctors wherever they practice? Tenure for marginal practitioners and those twelve step compensation tables embedded in nearly all teachers’ contracts wouldn’t be far behind…

Obama showed his hand in yanking the school vouchers in the DC school system. When private choice threatened to disinfect the stubborn bacteria in DC’s public schools, choice was flushed. Expect more of the same under Obama’s public school system look-alike for health care.

Interestingly enough, there is a story in the Associated Press titled, High-Spending California School System Collapsing. Of course the AP, being what it is, constantly infers the problems with inadequate funding, and decries the inability to raise taxes. As though growing the government and spending more money will somehow solve the problems, and magically transform the schools into producing stellar students. The head of the teachers union said: “We can’t cut our way out of this.” We can’t tax, borrow and spend our way out either, since that is how this mess got started to begin with. Like most things run by government, we’re told the ‘problem’ is always not enough money, when in reality it goes much deeper to the inherent inefficiencies and waste (not to mention corruption). And when has a government institution ever been satisfied with their level of funding?

Also worth noting, and it’s not getting much attention in the mainstream media, is that Obama’s plan specifically exempts members of Congress (along with federal employees; the exemptions are in section 3116). So politicians do not have to participate, just like many of them do not participate in public schools by sending their children elsewhere. Bureaucrat-controlled medicine will lead to a lower quality of care for all patients, much like government schools provide a lower quality of education for all students.