In the January 30, 2012 issue of our local newspaper, the
TimesDaily, there was a photo of some graffiti left by an Occupy Oakland
participant in California. The graffiti consisted of the exact words I used for
the title of this post: “Free Health Care For Everybody.” Now who could
disagree with that statement? Everybody likes free stuff, and given how
expensive healthcare can be these days, getting it free would be a great money saver.
So, how do we start? What plans must we put in place to make
this worthwhile venture a success? Well, a good place to start would be to ask
doctors to quit charging for their services. Most of the cost of healthcare
most likely resides here since millions of people visit doctors of one type or
another every day. I suspect that they will object to this and try to convince
us of how expensive it was to attend medical school, how much money it takes to
rent a space for their practice, and how they must pay for equipment,
utilities, malpractice insurance, staff salaries and benefits, and a myriad of
other things. Well, don’t be fooled. Healthcare is too important a commodity to
be left to the vagaries of a free market with the greedy doctors trying to
actually make a profit. But we can expect most if not all doctors to claim that
supporting their families is more important to them than helping the rest of
us. So, we must be prepared to force them to provide their services without
recompense.
The same will have to be applied to hospitals and all the
people that work for them. And let’s not forget about all those pharmaceutical
companies. We will have to forcefully make it known that we still expect them
to spend billions of dollars developing new lifesaving drugs, but provide those
drugs at no cost to the public.
We can expect retaliation from all these medical
professionals in the form of strongly urging the rest of us to provide our
services to them for free also. They’ll probably say something like, “Food is
just as important to a person’s health as is medical care. Since we don’t have
any money, and we need food to survive, we should have our food provided for
free. And while we are at it, we also need housing and transportation. So, give
us these things also.” No matter how logical their arguments may be, we must
stand strong and insist that they pay us for the goods and services we provide
while they continue to provide their services at no cost to us.
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Well, as you can hopefully tell, I’m being facetious. There
isn’t any such thing as FREE healthcare. And for that matter, there is no such
thing as having any goods or services that cost nothing. What the Occupy
Oakland graffiti writer really means is “free healthcare for me at somebody
else’s expense.” So, how would that work?
There have been many methods suggested for how to provide
universal healthcare within the US. Some methods are already being used in
other countries. But the bottom line for all of these methods is that some
people pay nothing, some pay less than the cost of the services provided to
them, some pay the same as the cost of the services provided to them, and some
pay more than the cost of the services provided to them. So, it ends up being a
great deal for some and a terrible one for others.
You might ask, “Isn’t that exactly the same result people
get when buying insurance?” And indeed, the answer is “Yes.” Insurance is one
of those strange commodities that people purchase with the hope of NEVER
getting their money back. But, there is one major difference. Insurance is voluntary;
a government program is not. There has been a lot of controversy lately about
the Constitutionality of an individual mandate for health insurance. In other
words, is it Constitutional for the federal government to force all individual
citizens to purchase some form of health insurance?
I personally believe that it is extremely UN-Constitutional
for the federal government to force its citizens to buy ANYTHING, including
health insurance. But even if it were Constitutional, I believe it can
ultimately lead to some very bad consequences, such as taking away many of the
freedoms we currently enjoy. It may take many years for the problems to
manifest themselves to an unacceptable level, just as communism took many years
before it failed in the Soviet Union. However, I believe the problems will
eventually come.
Suppose we implement a healthcare plan here in the US that
provides all people with any medical services they need at any time. Almost
immediately all of those expensive procedures that people chose not to have
done due to the cost will be scheduled. Over time, as more and more procedures
are done, the authorities will begin to see that there is more money being
spent than being taken in. Choices will have to be made. Charge everybody more
for their “insurance,” or cut costs in some way. Most likely both will occur. They
will begin paying doctors and hospitals and drug companies less for their goods
and services. This will cause some on the edge to go out of business, and it
will most likely affect people in rural areas the most. Eventually, the feds
will begin to realize that they cannot cut payments anymore and will try to
ration care to cut costs. This will upset many people who will have to forego medical
procedures that could help them. Additionally, the feds will also realize that
many of the procedures that people are getting relate to bad lifestyle choices.
They will begin pushing for regulations on a number of different fronts. Some
of these would be: smoking, fat and sugar intake, alcohol consumption, and the
amount of exercise people are getting. So, little by little our healthcare will
dwindle as our lifestyle choices become more and more regulated. In other
words, we will become less free.
When people buy insurance, they do so with the knowledge
that certain activities on their part can lead to their insurance costing more
than another person’s. For instance, if a person is a smoker, they will pay
more. If they are overweight and already have high blood pressure and high
glucose levels, they’ll pay more. If they are into extreme sports, they’ll pay
more. But the individual’s lifestyle choices remain his or her choice. On the other
hand, the tendency for government plans is for the leaders to begin mandating
actions rather than charge people differently according to risk.
So, which would you rather have? Freedom or “free”
healthcare? I’m afraid the evidence points to a fact that many simply refuse to
accept: WE CAN’T HAVE BOTH.
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