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11/20/08
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December
18, 2006 [This talk was given at the LRC Health and Wealth Conference in Foster City, California, December 2, 2006.] With the Democrats taking charge in Congress, we will surely hear talk of mandatory national health insurance, more spending for health care for the poor and elderly, and more taxes on individuals and business to pay for the whole scheme. This is admittedly not that different from what Republicans have been doing since taking over. In some ways, Republicans are even worse, driving us to socialism in the name of market reform and other sloganeering. Either way, we are stuck with a system that is moving the health sector ever more into the hands of the state. There are two popular images of socialized medicine. I don't think either captures what the reality is in our prosperous and largely capitalistic country. The first image is that held by the delusional left. They imagine that if most health care were publicly provided and administered by the state, people of all social classes, age groups, and races and sexes, would have equal access. Enlightened public bureaucrats would make the essential decisions about health priorities. Leftists imagine that this will save money in the long run because people will be prevented from doing things that cause them to get sick and die prematurely, such as smoke, eat fast foods, and fail to go on long nature walks. Mostly the left-wing view is of the negative sort. It makes them crazy, and offends their moral sense, that the rich can afford better health care than the poor. They believe that it violates a sense of fairness that the rich have the means to live longer, healthier lives, than the poor, who are left to the mercy of life's exigencies. But let's say that we can show that under a capitalist health market, the poor will be better off in absolute terms. I doubt very seriously that this will satisfy the true socialist. What bothers him is not so much bad health as the unequal access to good health. For the same reason, the socialist is not persuaded by the argument that the poor will be richer under capitalism because they are aware that inequality will continue to exist under capitalism. It is more important to them to reduce the well-being of the rich than it is to improve the lot of the poor, so long as the poor still constitute an identifiable class within the population. (Read the rest here - click your "back" button to return to The Price of Liberty)
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