While newly elected Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s ideas for education have gotten more attention than his ideas for health care, he made during his inaugural speech Tuesday what could be considered an egalitarian argument for choices in medical delivery.

In the same breath that the Republican governor called for the “maximum amount of choice” in education, he demanded that government stop treating patients “like interchangeable parts on an assembly line.”

Specifically:

Patients want to be treated as individuals … choosing their own doctors and making their own decisions in consultation with those doctors … The very wealthy will always have plenty of options. But most Floridians have far too little say in how their children are educated or how health care services are provided.

This speaks to the intriguing intellectual continuum represented in two equally polarizing public policy debates.

There aren’t many people in the mainstream who would quibble with Scott’s call to give low-income families opportunities to choose the right doctor and to make decisions in consultation with those doctors. But in the arena of education those options tend to take on an entirely different character. Though we may feel low-income parents should have the freedom to choose their children’s doctors we are not sure whether that should extend to their children’s schools or teachers.

In virtually every area of life but K-12 education, low-income citizens receiving public support are empowered to choose from government-approved private providers. And that middle ground in health care is generally seen as the nexus in the debate over health care reform. (more…)