Meditates on socialized medicine, and its friends and relatives:

Having lived in Japan for twelve years and had several friends who (unlike me) work in health care, I had a lot of lively discussions about the relative merits of socialized medicine. What always drove me crazy was when people talked as if the money for health care weren't going to have to come from somewhere. There's plenty of great health care available in Japan, but stories have surfaced recently about patients' being turned away or dumped by hospitals, and about desperate Japanese who travel to China for organ transplants. One doesn't want to be like the NYT Style Section and inflate every clutch of three colorful anecdotes into a Major Trend, but the aging society does mean that there will be fewer workers supporting more geriatric patients in short order. Everyone is worried.

Of course, that's a practical, not philosophical, problem. Whittle writes,

Constitutional rights protect us from things: intimidation, illegal search and seizure, self-incrimination, and so on. The revolutionary idea of our Founding Fathers was that people had a God-given right to live as they saw fit. Our constitutional rights protect us from the power of government.

But these new so-called "rights" are about the government — who the Founders saw as the enemy — giving us things: food, health care, education... And when we have a right to be given stuff that previously we had to work for, then there is no reason — none — to go and work for them. The goody bag has no bottom, except bankruptcy and ruin.

And, of course, when the government is in charge of giving out goodies, it gets to set priorities and trade-offs for individuals. Is your need for a procedure "urgent"? What's an acceptable minimum for "quality of life"? Would you prefer to buy less health coverage and more of something else you value more highly? What happens when functionaries start telling fat people they don't deserve bypass surgery because they've spent their lives tunneling through five Entenmann's cakes a week?

Not, I hasten to add, that the current American system is anywhere near perfect...but then, neither is it a free-market system.

Just corrupt, is all—and not all it could be. Yet far, far, better than socialized medicine. More likely to let me decide which goodies are best for me. Which I should have, and which I do not want.

Read the whole thing, and follow over to Whittle's piece, while you're at it.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:47 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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