The Health Care Fight: A Matter of Life and Liberty
Today's Wall Street Journal editorial, The Berwick Evasion, reminds us that the health care fight was and remains huge. It cuts to the animating core of what America is -- is it a place where you have the liberty to pursue happiness (which damn sure includes the choice of physician and care and timing), or will it be a place where authoritarian bureaucrats impersonally limit your freedom based on an one-size-fits-all rules?
The idea that the economic allocation of finite resources -- something that is true of everything, perhaps save air -- and which has built in incentives for improving access, affordability, and innovation is morally or functionally equivalent to political rationing -- which leads to fewer resources and choices over time -- is an argument only a morally facile authoritarian could embrace.
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Jun '10
Re: The Health Care Fight: A Matter of Life and Liberty
Heather: Great points--I agree.
Your comments got me thinking about a new project (in about ten years) for Pat Sajak and Rob Long. It will be called "Wheel of Fortune II." Same concept, but instead of playing for money (which, by then, will be like the German mark in Weimar Germany), the contestants can play for chits that will allow them to obtain healthcare in the private clinics (the kind that will still do MRIs and other similar procedures) that will provide service to the healthcare nomenklatura. You know, the bureaucrats who will administer the inferior egalitarian healthcare for the rest of us.
Re: The Health Care Fight: A Matter of Life and Liberty
Why is it that for the Left, the pie is always just so or getting smaller? What I never hear from those folks is an enthusiasm -- a call to arms! -- to actually, you know, cure stuff. There's always this rote, clichéd tsk-tsk about such-and-such a percentage of the GDP going to health care, as if that number is somehow, by itself, meaningful. It's never about unleashing American innovation or encouraging the dynamic power of the free market, maybe because they don't believe in either one of those.
Why, again, are the resources finite? If people are getting value from something -- an advanced cancer treatment; a grande latte at Starbucks -- they're always willing to pay more. I'm not clear on why a free-market system backstopped by generous vouchers for the poor wouldn't be the right answer. Works for food stamps -- they're so successful that our poor people are actually fat. If you had tried to tell someone that in 1952 -- Hey! Poor people in the future will be overweight! -- they'd have looked at you like you were crazy.