Health Care, Housing, Education Worse When Government Helps

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

There's a natural human impulse to help people who need a hand. In the political world, that often translates to an impulse to have government help people who need a hand. Who wants to argue with that?

But experience tells us that it's not always easy to help. Individuals' good intentions go awry. Government programs sometimes produce unintended consequences that make things worse for the intended beneficiaries.

Consider what could be called the three H's: health care, housing and higher education.

Over the last generation and more, government has stepped in to help ordinary individuals and those with special problems on all three issues. The results have been, well, not as good as intended.

Take health care. Just about every health care expert from right to left believes that government's first real foray into the field has been counterproductive.