Back before the recent “health care reform bill” was passed progressives in Boulder were campaigning for a single-payer health care system. Conservatives tried to raise the specter of socialized health care in Canada and in the UK. Progressives knocked both down by saying that the horror stories in the UK were selective cherry picking, that you could find similar stories in our health care system in the U.S., and that the health care system in Canada was fine. Some wrote op-eds in the local paper saying that they had been to Canada, or some country in Europe, had used the clinics for free, or for a very low government regulated fee, and they got prompt and proper treatment. No problems. The conservatives came back with, “Yeah, but that’s for routine care. If you have cancer your chances of survival are not good in countries with socialized medicine.”
Dick Morris wrote a column earlier this month on what’s happening in Canada. They now have a two-tier health care system: One private, for the wealthy, and one public for the poor and middle class. Canadians found a loophole in the law that allows for private clinics so long as those clinics do not charge a fee for a service. Instead they charge for a yearly membership, and during that year patients get whatever care is within the capacity of the clinic to offer, with no fee-for-service. As usual the socialists are blaming the private sector for the problems that the public sector created. It sounds just like the debate over vouchers: “The private clinics are ‘stealing’ doctors that are needed in the public system.” No one’s taking these doctors at gunpoint. They are going to the private clinics of their own free will. It’s what they want. Better yet, it’s what their patients want (well, the service, anyway, not the cost. But they like the service)! It’s that damn free trade again! Doctors like the money. Their patients like the service. Both benefit, but all the socialists can see is the private doctors getting more money, and denying their services to the “needy” (their friends). Those greedy bastards!
You see, socialism doesn’t like self-interested providers of a service or product. Their motivation is supposed to be driven by the dictates of the political powers that be, preferably those who supposedly represent “the people”. That is the way they see the world. The health care system is too big and powerful to be trusted with its own motivations. It creates a negative effect on society, and it exploits patients who are too weak to have a say. Well yeah, in a controlled, restricted system where the government interferes too heavily in the private market, that’s true. Lighten the controls on competition, and they wouldn’t be so big and powerful anymore.
The socialists see every major trend as being directed by some set of big powerful interests that are of like mind and collude with each other to grab all that they can for their own greed. So socialists might as well be doing the directing, since they see themselves as smarter and morally superior to everyone else. They hate it when a bunch of “peons” try to take the initiative for themselves. They’re seen as trying to build their own power base by exploiting their patients, because they demand to set their own pay level. Oh the horror! Oy, how they miss the point! It’s all about power and money to socialists. The free market can’t be trusted to distribute resources, because it creates “injustice” and chaos–it creates inequality. They, the “wise ones”, must be able to control resources so that those who need them the most (their friends and their constituents, that is) can benefit, and of course only they know what will benefit their friends, because those people are too powerless to take care of themselves. It’s the societal equivalent of the dysfunctional co-dependent relationship!
Steven Crowder did another great video on the realities of the Canadian health care system, its quality of care and its wider effects.
Crowder asks that interested viewers “leave comments below”. Well that’s on the YouTube page for this video, which is here. I have no association with Steven Crowder or PJTV. So leave comments here about what I said, and leave comments for Steven at his YouTube page.
It’s good to keep abreast of stuff like this, because conservatives see the recent so-called health care reform as just single-payer in a different form. I think they’re right. Some say that the current set-up will inevitably fail, at which time the progressives will be ready to offer fully government-run health care as the only viable option. We need to recognize what we’re getting into so we can reject it and take a different course.
Hi guys and gals. I happened to catch this clip somewhere on cable earlier this month (probably on Fox News), and I did a double-take, “What did she say??” It turns out Speaker Pelosi said this on May 12, but I don’t know that a lot of people heard about it. (Well, not a lot of people read this blog. So the fact that I’m putting it here is not going to help.)
I have to admit what Pelosi said sounds pretty seductive. I have been taking a “leave” from work for a while now, partly because I’ve had a ton of family-related issues to deal with over the last couple years that really have required my undivided attention and energy from time to time, but I have also been pursuing a dream of further developing a talent I have. This time in my life has sometimes been hard, and sometimes been very rewarding. I’m glad that I’ve had this opportunity. I feel very fortunate. I almost wish that more people could have the opportunity I’ve had. The thing is I’ve been financing a significant part of it myself. I am on no welfare programs, and I don’t plan on getting on the dole. My intention is to go back to work at some point.
I have my own dreams for how I’d like American society to change that I’m sure are partly in line with Pelosi’s vision for America, but what I don’t want is for America to turn into another version of Europe in terms of the people’s relationship to government.
I think Simon Rosenberg’s point (in the video clip) about entrepreneurism is valid, because Pelosi has brought up this issue when she’s talked about this in the past, though again, she emphasized the artistic/cultural pursuits that she hopes people embark on (source: a March 12 interview with Rachel Maddow (h/t to Mary Katherine Ham writing for the Washington Examiner)):
Nancy Pelosi: Everybody has so much to gain from this, small businesses, as I said, seniors, young people, women, our economy. Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk, but not job [locked] because of a child with asthma or someone in the family is bipolar. You name it. Any condition is job locking.
[This may have been a hastily done transcript, so I made a couple corrections to the quote — PIBoulder]
(Update 10-29-2011: The following paragraph was written to complement a video clip from a Fox News show I used when I wrote this post, which is no longer available.)
Moreso, I agree with Stephen Hayes’s analysis that it’s not about how “we’re all in this together.” I take offense at this attempt by progressives to market socialism to us. I mean, we have to admit to ourselves that that’s really what this phrase represents. We can be a united country on the large issues we can agree on, but don’t pretend that everyone has the same personal goals as everyone else. It’s about whether everyone is pulling their own weight–at least as that phrase applies to those who can pull their own weight, which is the vast majority of us. I totally agree. America was founded on the idea of individual liberty, individual responsibility, and a healthy respect for the natural and civil rights of others. We are a charitable, giving people. That has been demonstrated over and over again. All we need is to be made aware of a critical need, and we will give of our bounty to help out. The difference is it’s of our own free will! It’s not forced on us. That is the key.
The evil thing to me about how our government has handled health care over the years is that it doesn’t do a thing to solve the real problem, and that’s the rising cost of health care. It seems like no one in power is interested in looking at why health care costs are rising so much faster than the rate of inflation. The free market would keep such costs in line, but it’s clear that it’s not being allowed to do that. The rise in medical costs is indicative of a market where something is awry. There’s a good book on this by Regina Herzlinger called “Who Killed Health Care?” that lays out how it has been over-regulated and restricted. Here’s a hint: The states are a significant part of the problem, though that’s not the only factor affecting cost. As John Stossel has pointed out, the fact that we use health insurance to handle our medical costs so much is a significant contributor to the problem as well. There’s no transparency on health care costs, so doctors and patients have no idea how much medical procedures cost. That information is critical to the functioning of a free market. Another factor is health insurers are often required to cover routine procedures, something for which the concept of insurance is not designed.
Think about this as well: Insurance causes a third party to become the responsible party in medical decisions. This is the reason why people get treated one way when they have insurance, and a different way when they don’t. It has even affected employment.
I heard last year on “60 Minutes” about some employers firing employees who smoked. They were not supposed to smoke on the job, and they were not supposed to smoke on their free time, either! The employer literally encouraged fellow employees to snitch on workers who smoked before or after work hours. This is insane! Why were they doing this? Their group plan, which their employer paid for, would become more expensive if any of their employees smoked, and the business couldn’t afford that. So they felt forced to treat their employees like children.
Each factor: state control of health care, no transparency in costs, and insurance, contribute to the problems that each other factor creates. Medical insurance is practically a necessity in order to gain full access to all of the services that our health care system offers, because the cost of it would bankrupt most people (and it literally bankrupts some people). What we need is a free market solution that takes away what the federal and state governments are contributing to this problem, and allows people to break out of the inflationary cycle that has gotten us to this point.
So what is Pelosi’s agenda when she says to people (I’m paraphrasing), “We want people to feel free to pursue their passions, to be able to quit their jobs and become a photographer, writer, artist, etc.”? Is she really a dreamer who thinks this stuff? Or, is she thinking like a scheming politician? Is she trying to lull people into further weakening the private sector, causing more unemployment, and more businesses to fail for lack of talent? I can see that she is trying to get people to generate new ideas, and rejuvenate culture, which is positive, but not everybody who quits their job is going to know how to do that. In fact I think most people won’t. The end result, though, is more government dependence. According to the new rules, if an employee changes their health insurance plan, they are restricted in what choices they have. If they quit their jobs, and want to return to work later, even if their old or new employer offers the same group insurance, they can’t go back to their old plan. The existing plans are being phased out by attrition, forced by regulation.
Obama said before his plan was passed that you can keep your insurance under the new rules. Well, no you can’t. It was recently revealed that many employers plan on canceling their employee group plans, and just having employees get their own private insurance through the planned government-sanctioned exchanges, or get on Medicaid (which is a whole other issue), because it makes financial sense for them to do that. It looks like it’s also going to impact your ability to choose your doctor, and stay with the one you chose, another thing Obama promised.
From her own mouth Pelosi reveals the ultimate conclusion of ObamaCare: People are going to be lulled into not working, because they are going to feel protected by the social safety net. Just about everybody is ultimately going to be dependent on the government system in one way or another.
Progressives claim that they are trying to make “progress” in our society, but it seems to me in this analysis that they are in fact retrogressive, because what they are really doing is taking us in the direction of a European scheme of socialism that doesn’t work. You really have to understand the history of Western civilization from the 17th to the 19th century to get this.
America represented a split from Europe in more ways than one, but what I mean to emphasize here is that America took to the ideas of the Enlightenment much more than Europe did. The Enlightenment was of course created in Europe in the 17th century, but within 100 years they had started to move away from it. We created our government based on Enlightenment ideas. Europe fell into an unreasoning religious worship of Nature (replacing their worship of God), which created the fertile ground for socialism. All they did was replace the divine right of monarchs with the divinity of humanity, and transition from their traditional form of despotism and serfdom to a more modern version of it that was perhaps less oppressive than what came before (at least until fascism and communism came along), but was nothing like our system, which supported liberty. It may have seemed like progress to Europeans, but it is not progress for America. If anything it represents American decline.
The reason I say this is the Founders did a very good job of designing a government that supported the human spirit. It did not coddle. The point is it did not snuff out the positive attributes of people. It did not create perfection, because they recognized that no government could possibly create that. They instead tried to recognize what drives people, and to use that to create good outcomes. They were not entirely successful in this endeavor, and they recognized that their work was incomplete. That is no reason to throw out what they gave us. We should instead build upon it using the same principles by which they constructed our Constitution, and use that for the framework of all deliberations regarding the structure of our government. This requires learning from past mistakes, not just our own, but those of other civilizations. European style government is not the pinnacle of civilization, just a competing version of it. We can see by the financial troubles they are having now why we should question its validity for us.
This is a good article by Robert J. Sameulson, called “Health-care nation”, on the current situation with health care, and what’s being proposed for it. I think he is half right about the solution, lowering health care spending. I think the more important part of the solution is lowering costs. There are a variety of things that could be done to help with that, and so far I haven’t seen any of them proposed. One of them is tort reform.
The striking thing is that the federal government has not exercised its constitutional interstate commerce regulatory powers in this issue. Instead it has allowed states to set up “fiefdoms” of health care, both in insurance and in medical facilities, which naturally drive up costs. So far as I know the federal government has not allowed these kinds of anti-competitive practices for any other product or service. It should break down the barriers the states have erected, which it has the legal authority to do.
I heard about Rep. Alan Grayson’s slam on the “Republican health care plan” yesterday:
As luck would have it I was going through some old college newspapers I had saved from years ago and I happened upon this ad for a horror movie that came out in 1992, called “Dr. Giggles”:
Note the teaser: “If you’re from Moorehigh and you get sick, fall on your knees and pray you die quick”…just like Rep. Grayson says in his speech.
This seems like a perfect parody of how Democrats view the current health care system. In one scene the demented doctor finds a victim under some sheets in bed, and says just as he pulls out his scalpel (weapon), “I hope you have protection”. What delicious irony!
Now, this is yet another attempt by the Democrats to take the attention off of their own infighting, and demagogue the Republicans. It’s the oldest Democratic trick in the book: It’s all someone else’s fault. But the pretext to this attack is a Democratic conceit: The health care system is a money-grubbing business that will eat you alive if you fall into its clutches, and the Democrats are here to save you from this evil system.
But who created this evil system? If you really look at it from a systemic perspective, the problem was created by a mindset which believes that the government and big institutions should ensure that we all have access to health care, while at the same time making it open season on this medical system in our courts. It has in fact been an example of why planned economies don’t work. While they have promised access for all, what they neglect to tell us are the consequences of this scheme: Increasing demand for an artificially restricted resource, and increasing pressure on this resource from people who want to play “jackpot” in the courts. It’s also restricted our choices in health insurance, creating captive markets that are easy to exploit. It contributes to higher costs for all who participate in the medical system.
What the Democrats ultimately seek to do is to create a “political economy”, one where prices for precious commodities like health care are not determined by a competitive market where supply and demand are constantly balanced against each other, but rather by what interest groups think medical care should cost. You heard me right. This is a big “camel’s nose under the tent” for price controls. Never mind what doctors or medical suppliers think. According to the Democrats they’re part of the problem!
At the root of it all is a belief that capitalism has failed (another Democratic conceit: Blaming capitalism for the failure of their own initiatives!), and that government should take its place (want some more??). This is the same belief system that prevailed during the Great Depression under FDR. Price controls came into existence and persisted into the 1970s. Finally in the 1980s price controls were seen as the failure that they were, and were abolished. It remains to be seen if we will remember our history and reject such failed policy regimes. This returns us to an old “Reaganism”: Government is not the solution to the problem. It is the problem!
Posted by PIBoulder 
Politically Incorrect in Boulder 