A friend asked me the other night why I don't think poor people should have the same health care as rich people.
First, I think the question implies a false premise, which is that we can create a system that would in fact give poor people the same health care that rich people have. That is false. Rich people, and I would venture to say that in this case this is the majority of Americans, get fantastic health care because they can pay for the best and because the free market is incented to provide the best to make profits, i.e. a free-market system. True there are many flaws in the landscape of the free market in the health care world – in many ways it is not as free of a market as say retail goods are but let’s set that aside for a moment.
The brief answer to the question that would be more accurate is this. Of course I, like everyone, wish that all people had the best health care, and health insurance. I also wish that everyone had a fabulous house, car, food, friends, etc. However, I do not believe it is possible to provide everyone with all these wonderful things without sacrificing something else I hold more valuable, liberty. I believe that Liberty trumps Equality. I believe that the reason this country is great is not because we strive for economic equality but economic liberty. I believe that the government should not be the provider of goods and services; I believe that to be the role of individuals and free enterprise. I believe the government’s role is as regulator to ensure that the relationship between providers of goods and services and the consumers of goods and services does not become exploitive and abusive. To entrust one entity, i.e. the government with both roles of provider and regulator is a very bad idea. I believe Big Government is more dangerous than Big Business. I have no faith that the government who faces no penalties for not controlling quality, fraud, or budgets and have shown absolutely no historical record of doing so would by some miracle do so now. I do not believe they are being honest when, for example, they say that they will cut Medicare by hundreds of billions of dollars to help fund this new or expanded entitlement when they have passed similar mandates upon themselves before wherein they have decreed a Medicare budget cut and never once actually made the cut even though it meant budget and cost overruns in other programs.
I believe that many solutions proposed by politicians are most often poor for many reasons including: politicians are usually under educated in the problem area, they are fed highly biased information from lobbyists, also politicians are motivated not by a desire to provide the best product/service to the consumer in a cost effective manner – but to get re-elected and secure campaign financing. An example would be the idea of preventing insurance companies from denying those with pre-existing conditions. Sounds wonderful at first glance, it’s a terrible idea because no one would get insurance until they got sick, they would be a fool not to (imagine if you could get car insurance after the accident and they would have to pay for the repairs). The only way to fix this dilemma is with a national mandate to force everyone to buy health insurance. Unfortunately this is unconstitutional; the government doesn’t have the power to force everyone to purchase an item simply because they are alive, no matter how well meaning. The rights of the government are enumerated in the constitution and those who believe in un-enumerated rights are opening the door to a world of massive government control. Some say how they can mandate car insurance but not health insurance. Car insurance is based on regulation of an interstate commerce privilege of car ownership (covered under the interstate commerce clause). You can regulate privileges, you cannot regulate rights (with the exceptions of in the case of protecting the rights of others). Some argue that healthcare or health insurance is a right. This is absurd. They clearly do not understand the difference between a right and a privilege.
What people don’t appreciate today is that as government gets bigger the individual gets smaller. Every time the government makes a new rule they have taken a decision away from the individual. The more you restrict people’s agency the more you restrict their ability to learn and grow. No other nation has had Liberty (i.e. Agency) as so core to its being as America has, and as governments and entitlement programs grow we change more into a culture like Europe that does not value Liberty of the individual as core to its identity. Equality and fairness under the law is important, equality and fairness economically is a utopian dream that in order to obtain the liberties of the individual must be sacrificed in part or whole depending on how far the dream is to be pursued.
I, like almost everyone, agree that the current system is broken and needs fixing. The status quo is not acceptable. However, our nation needs documents that are built upon principals like our founding documents, our founding fathers formed the entire federal government with a handful of documents – 2,200 of health care pages that only lawyers can understand tells me they are creating a structure more like the Internal Revenue Tax Code. A document that in my opinion is not a document that enhances liberty and agency, but rather enlarges the government and empowers the faceless bureaucrat. Documents like this reduce, restrict, and strangle the individual rather than celebrating and empowering him.
