I just heard it again. Another Republican congressman saying we need to “repeal Obamacare” so that we can immediately “replace” it with something else. “The system is broken…we know that… and we need to act …”
A famous quote springs to mind: “Government is not the solution to our problems… Government IS the problem!”
In order to “fix” healthcare, we must start with #1.
Healthcare: A Right?
Nomadic tribes did not spend time developing technologies to deal with sick people. Beyond the common medicine man cures, most hunting and gathering peoples left deformed infants, sick people, and elderly who could not keep up, to die in nature. Survival of the tribe depended upon such harsh reality.
In today’s world of productive farming and advancing technology, with all of our basic needs met in abundance, we have the time and money to devote to ever-improving healthcare. And my, how it has improved! We have all benefited from advances in basic healthcare (vaccines against Polio and Smallpox, penicillin to cure common infections, etc.) and in what were once considered extraordinary procedures such as open-heart surgery and hip replacements.
But do we have a “right” to any of this? No. If one defends the concept of “healthcare rights,” one must endorse the taking of one man’s money, time and/or labor to give it to one who has not earned it. Thanks to fundamental, God-given rights, we Americans have equal opportunity to purchase the vaccine, the surgeon’s time or the antibiotics.
But who pays? The answer is a matter of life and death.
Sharing the Costs
Back when the provision of health care services in the US was essentially free of Government intervention, individuals paid for their doctors visits directly. Many individuals decided that it made sense to contribute to a community pool of money to keep themselves out of financial ruin in the event of a devastating problem. This was the traditional insurance program. That same insurance program likely would have excluded some rare and untreatable conditions, so that the money would be available for treatments of illnesses more likely to occur. That same insurance program likely would have had a rule that a new person who had just begun to contribute to the fund would not have all the same benefits as someone who had contributed for many years. In the absence of these “rules,” the fund would cease to exist, and nobody would be insured.
In the event that someone in the community contracted a rare disease or someone without insurance got sick, individuals, communities, and/or churches would pool extra money to help. In a Christian-based, benevolent society, this occurred regularly. (It still does.)
But at some point, we, as a society, decided that paying a little extra tax to help cover health care was a good idea. And so we (benevolently) went down the slippery pathway to allowing Government into what had always been a market-based sector of our economy.
This sounded good in theory, but in reality, it set us up for eventual failure due to…
The natural human tendency to cheat a big, faceless, bureaucratic system into which they have (or have not) contributed hard-earned money.
Over the last several decades, Government got involved in healthcare a variety of ways, including but not limited to: Regulating insurance companies and products; Requiring licensing for healthcare providers and pharmacists; Establishing the Medicare and Medicaid systems; Establishing an expensive approval system for new pharmaceutical products.
As a friend of mine stated in an online forum,
“We have had government health care as long as Janet and I have been alive.
We can only hire the services of a government approved doctor.
We can only buy most medicine needed to treat illness with a permission slip from a government approved doctor.
We must buy medicine from a government approved pharmacist.
We can only buy government approved insurance.
In a true free market I could Google my symptoms, walk into a store, [and] buy my medicine without a permission slip…”
Let us put aside the horrendous problems that arise due to the misguided concept that government will protect us against rogue operators through the host of accreditations, approvals, regulations, licensing and laws. Let’s just deal with the funding side of things (direct payments through Medicare and Medicaid and indirect socialization of payments through rules on insurance companies. Essentially, insurance under the current system has become the same thing as Government).
Whenever Government is involved (whether local, state or federal) in anything, almost without fail, even good people jump into “game mode.”
- Name of the game: Government Gimme Gimme.
- Object of the game: Get as much out of government – directly or indirectly – as possible as quickly as possible.
- To win the game: Get more back out of government than what you pay in, relative to anyone else playing.
When the game is Government Gimme Gimme, rational individuals know that if they don’t play the game well, their competitor who does will cream them. And so, for example, a hospital stay that would otherwise be billed out at $500 gets charged out at $2,500. A Q-tip that would cost a small fraction of a dollar gets billed out at $5.
It’s easy to rationalize the milking of the system. “I’m not hurting anyone” is true at the individual transaction level. But at the aggregate, everyone gets hurt. And we end up with what we’ve got: A healthcare system that is expensive, grossly unresponsive relative to cost, socialist in everything but name, and ripe for an Obamacare-type “solution.”
Conclusion
Healthcare is not a right. Health is important, no doubt. And so, most individuals will be willing to pay whatever it takes to maintain or restore their health. And because there is a willingness to pay, in a free society, there will be competition in the supply of services. Prices will not soar.
Those who cannot afford to pay for their own healthcare will still have options. We live in a caring and generous society. Successful people long to contribute to charities, churches and their communities.
We MUST understand, though, that our own good intentions, if implemented through forced taxation rather than voluntary donation, will result in horrendous, unimaginable outcomes. No matter how nice we are, no matter how compassionate…
if we support a Government program to advance our agenda, we PAY for it many times over, and do not get what we wanted in the first place.
Now, the Barak Obamas and Hillary Clintons, the Mitt Romneys and it seems every “caring” politician inside the Beltway, all have a plan to save us from this “horrible” industry.
We might be shocked and appalled at the latest chapter in the socialization of our health care industry. But it’s a super highway we’ve been going down for a long time.
We have no one but ourselves to blame.
