The conservative movement has long been based upon the belief that market forces create the best of circumstances for all people when left free to flourish. In most cases, I believe fully in that principle.
Yet, that premise is based upon the idea that people make rational economic decisions in each and ever choice they make. Health care, however, seems to be a place where rational decisions are not made.
Think on this example. Suppose your father, mother, son or daughter was lying in a hospital and fighting for their lives. Then suppose some hospital staffer walks up to you and says, “Sign this.” You will not sit there and think rationally about the market forces. You will sign whatever is put in front of you, in hopes that your loved ones get the care that they need.
I learned about that firsthand five years ago when my father was critically injured in an automobile accident, and I was the first relative at the hospital. I would have agreed to anything. If someone had told me, “you will owe one million dollars with 50% interest,” I would have agreed to it. I relearned that lesson again recently, when one of my best friends was diagnosed with liver cancer. I would sign any note, or any obligation, that would give him a longer lease on life. I know his wife and parents would as well.
Deciding whether or not to agree to the fees for one’s health care or one’s loved one’s health care is not like shopping for a shirt and deciding Wal-Mart has the best price. It is just not rational to expect that human beings will act rationally in choosing health care. They want what will save lives, and the costs are damned.
There are cold souls out there who realize that and take advantage of it. Not so long ago in our country, the medical profession was based upon serving others. The vast majority of hospitals at one time were charitable in nature and non profit. The local doctor was a man or woman who was respected for the care they gave, not because they wanted to get rich.
That is not so today. Hospitals, medical insurance companies, and yes, even the doctors. want the big money. The ever shrinking manufacturing base of this country has created an economy based upon service industries, the most profitable among them being health care. Hospitals that were once filled with doctors and nurses who wanted to serve first and a handful of administrators, have now become administrative monsters. Those administrative monsters are coupled with big insurance companies, where a clerk decides, based on some manual created by another clerical person, what healthcare treatment one should receive.
It is the biggest problem facing conservatism today, and the issue that Democrats, with all their faults, can score huge political points upon against Republicans. More and more, it seems the average, hardworking Joe Sixpack who would otherwise vote Republican without a thought faces some sort of healthcare nightmare. Perhaps it is with himself. Perhaps it is with a friend who can not get the care any human being should have because his health insurance provider decided otherwise. But, the problem is out there, lurking as a big shadow over the conservative movement.
As one man told me recently, he could, “live with gays getting married,” if someone would make sure his wife could get proper treatments for her cancer.
Such is the irrational nature of health care economics. People will give up almost anything, including their money, their principles, and their dignity, just to have a shot at getting good health care. It is virtually impossible to make a rational choice in such matters. Just imagine if oxygen was something we had to buy.
That makes health care the issue that haunts conservatives, especially us Christian conservatives, who believe in the teachings of Christ about taking care of the poor, the weak and the elderly.
As such, health care might prove to be the albatross around the Republican neck in the upcoming Presidential election and primaries in South Carolina. As the costs and business bureaucracy continues to grow, health care is quickly becoming the domestic crisis of our time.
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If Joe Sixpack are whoever you call him, has not done enough in life to make himself or his family get good health insurance, maybe they ought to go.
ReplyDeleteIt is called thinning out the gene pool. Losers dying out is not a bad thing.
I am sick and tired of losers whining about their circumstances. Perhaps we should do the world a favor and let them die out.
You're a sick bastard. What if Joe Sixpack was laid off when his job as shift supervisor in a local mill was shipped to China and he no longer had any health insurance.
ReplyDeleteOr what if Joe Sixpack small businessman cannot afford that luxury insurance plans that some coporations and the State gives, and his insurance that he buys doesn't cover all the expenses when someone in his family gets into an accident.
This issue is not as simple as some people like you make it out to be.
McCarthy, while you make compelling arguments for government regulated healthcare, albeit arguments based on “what feels right” as opposed to what is “logically right,” your general premise is undeniably wrong. Your entire argument is based upon the assumption that healthcare is a right. However, this is not so. Healthcare is a luxury available only to those that can afford it, and the reason for the tragic state of the medical community is because of the regulation that you call for.
ReplyDeleteConsider this: in order to be a “right,” the action must be completely independent of all things, and must not require the compulsion or action of another in order for it to exist. This is the root of rights like “the right to free speech,” or, “the right to freedom of religion.” Each of these things exists independent of any other person’s action. Nothing can be a right if it is conditional, such as this. Now, apply this context to healthcare, and you will see how quickly the notion of it being a right dissolves. Healthcare REQUIRES that a doctor treat you, making it dependent upon the actions of another person. In essence, you are denying that doctor the right to do as he chooses, in order to fulfill what you call a right to healthcare.
While I understand the pressure and desperate feelings people undergo when a loved one is in crisis, this still cannot supersede human reason and the idea one should be grateful for any healthcare at all. You cannot force that doctor to treat you, and if you did so, you would be violating his freedom—something you cannot do.
If you have a problem with the way healthcare is currently, then you should look at the reasons. As a Republican, as you claim to be, you should know that government has never done anything more efficiently or at a better quality than private industry. Government regulation always has the end result of worsening any situation it was applied to. So instead of calling for more government regulation, you should perhaps argue for less.
Healthcare will only become this “metaphorical” albatross only if Republicans subscribe to your neo-conservative/liberal line of thinking, and push the last bit of free-market conservatives to more libertarian political groups, and out of the Republican party.
Andrew is the one who is wrong here. Rights are granted by the accession of the people. If the people determine it is a right, then it is. Your example of freedom of speech is misplaced. You have freedom of speech because the laws of the people have granted you freedom of speech -- i.e. the right to political speech (although it has been quite abridged recently).
ReplyDeleteSo if the people deem healthcare and the access to healthcare a right, then it is a right. As well it should be.
I think what Andrew is trying to say is that in his opinion capitalist theory divines that consumers are only able to get what they can afford and that a service can't be governed as a right. I can debate that premise as well, but I won't go there other than to say: Andrew's assertion that the government can't fix problems with regulation and everything is better without government interference is antithetical to his examples. Are the lost textile jobs and the economy for those people better because of government receeding from control? Are there more people in poverty now that before the GOP began its war on social services in the 1980s?
Hardly.
It is a typical argument from white, upper middle class conservatives who have never suffered real hardship and thus have no empathy or sympathy for those who have suffered.
Ask those who have been outsourced for the sake of CEO salaries and stock price surges if they think healthcare is a right.
Truth is a three edged sword, Andrew is half there and Syd is half there. I can look back to the 50's and 60's before all the entitlements and bureaucratic crap that has driven healthcare costs higher than inflation has. Gone are the days when it was easy for a Doctor to treat a patient pro bono and take the hit on cost in his schedule C or for a drug rep to help keep a patient from going without their medicines without having to qualify that patient with "Mediscare" and a series of social workers.
ReplyDeleteMuch as the leftistas howl that Bush's war in Iraq is an unwinnable debacle, LBJ's war on poverty has brought us more poverty, more poor peons crossing the border and soaring national debt.
I guess that it is for the children, especially the debt service.