Always August, Pt. 6: The Ho$pital

For progressives, our present health care system's true sin is that there are people and businesses making money, and lots of it, off of health insurance, prescription drugs, medical equipment, hospital stays, and doctor's visits. Progressives, from the president on down, think health care is a right, just like our rights to speech or assembly. Of course, they fail to consider the essential difference between our constitutional rights and alleged rights such as the health care right: our constitutional rights are essentially priceless, whether they are for the right to speak freely or to petition the government, or to travel freely, or whatever. These rights do not have a line item on the budget. But, health care is not free, no matter how much you may wish it were thus. Further, anyone who might manage to transform the responsibility to provide for one's health care into a constitutional right to health care will find that health care will create a very large line item, or two.

I am not going to get into an extended discussion of the expense of modern American health care. Of course, it's expensive. But we get a lot out of it. We are living longer. We are living more fulfilling lives, even as we age. Diseases and injuries that would have once been deadly or debilitating have been alleviated, of not eliminated. Yeah, people have made money off of that. There's nothing like greedy capitalists, motivated by the lure of profit, to create a social good even as they rake in billions of dollars. Does this bother you Joe Progressive? It shouldn't. It doesn't really bother all those cool European countries that have universal health care (and high taxes + bad services. Is there a connection? Only the shadow knows.) because they have been free-riding on our private sector medical advances for decades.

It's pretty much useless to try to persuade progressive health care reformers of the above. That's really the key to their philosophy. No matter what they say, they hate the profit motive underlying the free market, even sophisticated citizens of the world who edited the Harvard Law Review (now the profit motive for attorneys...). If they could create a "right to food" that would justify the takeover of the food industry, they would do it tomorrow, denying all the while that they were engaging in de facto socialism. They literally believe that doctors should be paid no more than SIEU members working the desk at the DMV. President Red Pill/Blue Pill literally believes that there are large savings to be realized if technocrats can simply tell/order doctors to prescribe a cheaper pill that's "just as effective," typical lawyerly blather from someone who might not want us to see his grades in bio and chemistry. What if the cheaper pill is ony 80% as effective, hot shot? Will the "drug panel" have the final say on that?

Progressive health care reform advocates are engaging in the fatal conceit: the belief that life would be better for all, if only a small, dedicated group of experts could gather all of the necessary information and decide what is best for society. Who wouldn't want someone else making health care decisions for the common good? But, deep down, we all know something about human nature and human decision-making: it is fallible, almost comically so, and believing that there is a small incorruptible group of experts who can make decisions faster than the market is beyond naive. You pretty much have to go to college to develop that level of faith in humans deciding what's good for the rest of society.

Who is better able to decide what is best for your health: you and your doctor, facing off in an examining room, or a group of experts sitting around a table a thousand miles away? The question answers itself, and yet we must answer it again and again because of the persistence of the fatal conceit.