Vaporware

In the computer industry, there is a term called vaporware. The idea behind vaporware is that sometimes a company will announce a new product and begin taking orders. The marketing for the new product will include the specifications, along with claims for what the product will do. The only problem is that the company hasn’t actually built the hardware or written the software yet. The new product they are taking orders for does not exist yet.

Of course, companies indulge in the practice of selling vaporware for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they want to line up customers and guarantee the market before committing resources to building a new product. Maybe they want to announce their intentions to competitors to preempt the competition from going head to head in a market segment.

The beautiful part of vaporware is that you can lock up support for your product before you have to do the hard work of building something that actually does what you say it will.

For me, the Obama administration’s proposals for health care reform contain a large element of vaporware. Specifically, the cost containment mechanism seems pretty fuzzy, from what I have seen so far. Other than vague promises from hospital and pharmaceutical industry spokesmen that prices will drop, nothing I’ve read has indicated how the total amount of resources devoted to health care in this country will decline if more people have unfettered access to the medical system.

I think that is way the Obamacare bill has stalled in committee. People are figuring out that “reform” of the health care system mostly means transferring an enormous amount of power to the government, and for most of us, there will be no discernable benefit.

Without a mechanism for controlling costs, extending coverage to the uninsured through a government subsidized plan doesn’t reform the system at all. You’ve merely created a constituency for a new government entitlement. Eventually, taxes on all of us are going to have to go up to pay for the beneficiaries of that entitlement program.

With vaporware, sometimes the product never does get developed, or when it does, it doesn’t meet the original specs. With Obamacare, we’re in for the same thing.