… which is why Congress proposes to leave 18 million people still uninsured in the year 2019 (source). I’m getting more and more confused by our politicians. A lot of them have offered beautiful speeches about how it is both a tragedy and a violation of basic human rights for a person to live in the U.S. without health insurance. At present, millions of Americans are not customers of health insurance companies. After the proposed $1 trillion health care reform has had six years to work, we’ll be left with… millions of Americans who have no insurance. If this is indeed a moral issue, how can it be moral to leave millions in the same supposedly inhuman situation that they’re in right now?
I have not put my own name forward for a Nobel Peace Prize, but my own health care proposal would cover every human being living in the U.S., as well as visitors, all at a dramatically lower cost than what we’re currently spending (and certainly we wouldn’t need an extra $1 trillion thrown in). How is it that those who would leave 18 million without health insurance are able to claim the moral high ground?
It seems that many, including our alleged leaders in Washington, are confused. Health care may be a basic human right; health insurance is merely a means to that end.
The whole labeling of the the current debate as “health care reform”, when in fact it is health care insurance reform, has been a misnomer intended to inflame passions but serve no one.
It’s long been noted that your right to life doesn’t mean much at all if you’re, say, in the water with a shark. Claiming a moral imperative is just another tactic. It works because it’s easier to win an argument if anyone opposing you is inherently evil. I think we owe it to each other as good citizens to take care of those among us least able to take care of themselves–note this isn’t the middle class. The health care plan won’t guarantee, for example, that my eleven year old daughter can drink clean water at school. She can’t cause the pipes are old and rusted. She’s been carrying bottled water for the past six years, but this year the school has added those office style water coolers here and there throughout the hallways.
I second R Brown, and would like to point out that the misleading language goes one step further: This isn’t about health care, it’s about medical care, which is just one contributor to health, alongside diet, exercise, safe driving, and a host of other things, including ones we can’t control (e.g. genetics). So we should be talking about this monstrosity of a bill as “medical insurance reform”.
Except Arnold Kling points out that our current system of paying for medical care is insulation, not insurance. So: “medical financing system reform”.
I’m not just being picky. Terminology matters: if it didn’t, governments wouldn’t coin so many euphemisms.
“least able to take care of themselves–note this isn’t the middle class”
I’m a bit confused: are you advocating locking out the middle-class citizen/taxpayer from medical care?
I’m OK with a more transparent, cash-based system (and have long argued that health insurance is a failed concept). But I really can’t endorse a system where a Dilbert who works at company that is too small to get a good discount on health insurance is forced to pay 40% of his income in taxes but still has to pay the artifically inflated “Shiek rate” should he need to visit a doctor. A few nights in a hospital at $5k/night would bankrupt just about everyone.
I’m with George.
I want to further make sure we’re talking about “clinical medical services”, so as we’re not carelessly including life science R&D in our thinking.
Clinical medical services are a special kind of good. Its not a productive good in the sense that it necessarily increases the aggregate quantity and value of all goods and services produced by society. It *might*, but it doesn’t have to.
The amount of medical care provided needs to be measured against the productivity gains realized by treatment [against the untreated condition]
It can represent pure consumption of resources. In the case of medicare and medicaid, it probably frequently represents pure consumption.
A bad analogy would be to think of clinical medical providers as “Repairmen”
Some repairmen fix buggy whip machines, some fix 0.09 micrometer fab equipment. Not all repair is created equally.
If we create a system [and we have] that egregiously incentivizes buggy whip machine repair, you’re creating a potentially unsurmountable economic drain on the smaller portion of the economy that produces 0.09 micrometer fab equipment.
American medicine, for at least 150 years, has, correctly and wisely, recognized the importance of *NOT* getting paid on the marginal value of their service to the end user and instead want payment based on both monopoly pricing and arbitrarily fixed-prices [Medicare Relative Value Units]
The more I think about this, the more upsetting it becomes.
The carrying capacity of the productive economy for buggy whip repair people. fraudulent public employee pension management, usurious bank credit spreads, etc. is not unlimited.
My uninformed guess is we’ve passed that threshold sometime over the last 12 months.
Note, If I want to take care of my parents at the expense of my children, or at the expense of current consumption, that’s a private decision. It shouldn’t be a matter of national policy to transfer wealth intergenerationally.
The basic human rights in Bills of Rights are all first-gen rights that are required for a functioning democratic structure, and the other thing they share is that they do not impose a significant cost of compliance. They are the foundations of modern democratic states, and have a unique imperative as a result of this.
The new second-gen “rights” such as healthcare, water etc are all socialist stalking-horses that attempt to hijack the imperative of first-gen rights to push for greater action by government, for they all impose a significant cost of compliance that can only be satisfied by government spending or government forcing private citizens to take on the cost (which is really the same thing of course). The question “who pays for this” is conveniently elided by talk of the “human right” to healthcare, education, water, housing, even a job.
But even granted that these are real rights, it’s possible for government to pay for them with minimum distortion to the economy through the use of vouchers, something which the Swedish government does with education, I believe.