There already is a single-payer system in America. It’s called Medicare. Expanding Medicare is the new version of the public option. Medicare is bankrupting America. It’s delusional, immoral, and stupid to imagine that this is a good idea. Medicare is insolvent to the tune of thirty eight trillion dollars.
- $38,000,000,000,000.00
The Left have glommed onto the idea that federal mandates and a public option are good ideas. But the countries they most often cite as model health care policy examples— Canada, France, England, Germany— are all struggling with runaway, budget-busting health care costs. Expanding Medicare as a cost-control measure? To increase competition? The politicians promoting this deceitful policy and depicting their critics as inhumane are villains.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Labelling differences of political opinion “immoral” doesn’t strengthen one’s position; it merely degrades the term. Immoral is a word the Religious Right like to use as well. It doesn’t strengthen any of their arguments, either.
Requiring people to have some form of health insurance seems no more immoral to me than requiring them to pay taxes for things like a fire department, a police department, roads, schools, etc. We are all beneficiaries, however reluctant, of this immoral behavior.
I drive a car and the state requires me to buy auto insurance. Immoral?
Don’t you think it’s immoral that parents can raise children and not at the very least be required to provide them with health insurance? Does the right to live dangerously include the right to subject your children to the same perils? I think most jurists would say: no. But if you say yes then why stop at health care? Why force America to educate its youth? Communist China has no such requirement, and parents pay no mandatory public school taxes nor are they required to teach their children to read or write–a fact reflected in China’s lower literacy rate. And once we dispense with coercive educational requirements, why not follow this reductio ad absurdum to its logical conclusion?–which is the requirement that we feed and clothe our youth as well. Alas, China fails us here, as even their laissez-faire government won’t permit naked starving kids in the streets. But we could surely take back the moral high ground from China by permitting just that!
Or perhaps that would be immoral?
Scott, your premise seems to be that if people were not forced by threats of fine and imprisonment to undertake particular projects or behave in particular ways that, in and of themselves, are considered by most people to be beneficial, then those projects and behaviors would not happen. You’re saying coercion is necessary and that its benefits are greater than its costs. I don’t think you have an empirical basis for this stance, but you’re certainly not alone in taking it.
Once morally sanctioned and implemented, the same coercive apparatus that you intend to facilitate beneficial outcomes not only undermines your priorities (see public choice theory and review copious data about how government incentivizes and perpetuates failure) but also generates unintended consequences, all of which are characterized by the unsustainable, inevitably disastrous expansion of the State.
You can say, I want coercion only for this set of goals that sensible people agree upon. But you will get more than you bargained for once you start down that path.
If you are in favor of the initiation of force as a proper way for a society to accomplish the set of goals you have decided should be “high priorities,” then you will soon find yourself engaged in a never-ending cycle of deal-making with other people whose priorities are different from yours. And though at first that may be upsetting to you, especially if their priorities seem to be petty or counterproductive, eventually you’ll come to accept that you and they have agreed on the same principled stand (ie, initiating force is a morally legitimate methodology). Soon after that you’ll conclude not only that your disagreements with others who share that principle amount to battles over preferences in which neither of you will be able to mount a credible objection to the other but also that you have far more to gain by securing their support for your priorities by lending your support to theirs. And in this way governments expand… evading always the question of how it is that any person or group ever acquires the right to initiate force and stifling opposition by dismissing it out of hand, essentially as Pelosi did to the mere suggestion that there may be a Constitutional limit on the use of State power vis-a-vis Obamacare… “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
Every empirical failure of coercive public policy has been cited by its advocates as evidence that it is under-budgeted and that the breadth and depth of government power must be expanded to assure success. In this way, all governments grow until, finally, they collapse from the social dynamics created their abundant and cruel practical failures and their stratospheric costs. And right up until the final day of their collapse, advocates of such public policies have thrust upon us the same emotional plea, “but the children would be naked, malnourished, and illiterate were it not for the power of the State.”
According to the Dallas Fed, the national debt of this country’s federal government, not even including the epic debt of states like New York and California, is well over 100 trillion dollars. You’d think that Amtrak would run on time, that the streets would be pristine, that public high school graduate literacy rates would be celebrated, that Medicare and Medicaid would pay doctors in a timely manner. The reason none of that is happening is that coercion does not solve problems. Instead it distorts the natural voluntary mechanisms… freedom to contract for mutually agreeable prices and terms, the democratic profit-and-loss-based accountability and innovation of competitive markets… by which people’s needs are met and exceeded.
Because I am an optimist, I believe that most parents would take care of their children even if the State did not coerce them to do so.
Because I am a realist, I believe that some parents would not take care of their children were it not for coercion. Indeed, given the ample evidence of parents neglecting children even with coercion, I think it’s fair to say that I *know* some children would be neglected in the absence of any coercion. Some of these children might be helped by charities, but some would not. And that leaves naked starving children on our streets–a site that is not at all unusual in other parts of the world, but would sure seem like a step backward here in the USA.
Because I am a pragmatist, I don’t expect any principles to be implemented perfectly–no matter how perfect the ideas themselves may be, or how great they work in theoretical models or flights of fancy in our heads. I don’t expect a single all-encompassing set of ideas to be adequate in shaping every type of solution to every type of problem. Sadly, many solutions require coercion. Indeed, our need for any type of government at all is predicated on the need for rule-of-law and hence coercion. As you well know, every majority vote is potentially coercion against the minority. And so we have a Republic with a Constitution, separation of powers, checks and balances, etc. It sure isn’t a pretty system, but it’s not bad considering the historical record to date.
Because I am not perfect, I don’t have all the answers, nor do I believe that anyone else does. But in this case I do agree that requiring all citizens to have health care is unprecedented and perhaps unconstitutional. Should we all be required to have life insurance as well? How about theft insurance? Comet-impact insurance? I lament that some rather obvious health care reforms have been lumped together with these sweeping new requirements. I would have preferred a more gradual approach where reforms were passed first, followed by a period of evaluation, and then perhaps additional measures if needed. But this is as much about politics as anything else. And despite my reservations against requiring health care insurance for all, I see no problem with requiring parents to provide it for their children. So clearly for me this is about nuances and degrees and subtle shades of gray–the sort of things that are not accounted for by the rather one-track principles of most free market libertarians.