20 Comments

R Hampton
July 21st, 2011 | 3:43 pm

I’ve seen this before, but for those who advocate against Universal Healthcare, there is something remarkable to consider. Of the top five nations listed on the graph, four offer nationalized health insurance and/or health care:

* Republic of Ireland is governed by the Health Act 2004, which established a new body to be responsible for providing health and personal social services to everyone living in Ireland. In addition to the public-sector, there is also a large private health care market.

* Healthcare in Switzerland is universal and is regulated by the Federal Health Insurance Act of 1994. Basic health insurance is mandatory for all persons residing in Switzerland (within three months of taking up residence or being born in the country). Insurers are required to offer insurance to everyone, regardless of age or medical condition. They are not allowed to make a profit off this basic insurance, but can on supplemental plans.

* Hong Kong uses a variation of the “Beveridge Model” named for William Beveridge who designed Britain’s National Health Service. In this system, health care is provided and financed by the government through tax payments, just like the police force or the public library. The Department of Health’s main role is to safeguard the health of the community through promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative services in Hong Kong. The Hospital Authority is mainly responsible for delivering a comprehensive range of secondary and tertiary specialist care and medical rehabilitation through its network of health care facilities.

* Singapore uses a combination of compulsory savings from payroll deductions (funded by both employers and workers) a nationalized health insurance plan, and government subsidies, as well as “actively regulating the supply and prices of healthcare services in the country” to keep costs in check; the specific features have been described as potentially a “very difficult system to replicate in many other countries.” Many Singaporeans also have supplemental private health insurance (often provided by employers) for services not covered by the government’s programs.

Steve Drake
July 21st, 2011 | 4:07 pm

Interesting video Joe. Not sure of what the Charles Koch Foundation is, but the video makes a salient point. May our Lord be gracious enough to help us arrest the slide.

Joe Carter
July 21st, 2011 | 4:14 pm

I should have added a disclaimer that while I think the content of the video is worthwhile, I in no way endorse Charles Koch or his foundation. Koch is an extreme libertarian who holds positions (e.g., support of gay marriage) that are antithetical to my own.

andrew
July 21st, 2011 | 4:16 pm

less corruption? it would be hard to quantify such a thing….

Charlie Collier
July 21st, 2011 | 5:09 pm

The video opens with a loaded and leading question about where we’d choose to live. But then economic freedom is defined without so much as a mention of the freedom to choose where we live.

What sort of economic freedom is it that allows capital to travel but not labor? It’s the freedom of rich capitalists like the Kochs to preserve as much of their wealth as possible.

Joe Carter
July 21st, 2011 | 5:26 pm

Charlie Collier It’s the freedom of rich capitalists like the Kochs to preserve as much of their wealth as possible.

Which is why the Kochs are open-border enthusiasts, right? No, wait, that doesn’t fit into your narrative so. . .

Charlie Collier
July 21st, 2011 | 5:42 pm

That’s an interesting point Joe (and I’m not being facetious), but why wasn’t the freedom of labor mentioned in the video?

Joe Carter
July 21st, 2011 | 5:56 pm

That’s an interesting point Joe (and I’m not being facetious), but why wasn’t the freedom of labor mentioned in the video?

I suspect because (a) freedom of labor movement is not essential to economic freedom and (b) had they included it, they would have lost the interest of most Americans.

The libertarian view of immigration (i.e., open borders between all countries) is based on the assumption that economics is primary and that people should have the freedom to be whatever they want, wherever they want. This utopian view is, in my view, not only unbiblical but contrary to natural reason. Local culture and practices are also necessary to economic freedom. That requires cultural assimilation, which is anathama to the open borders crowd.

By the way, I think on many issues, you would find the Kochs more sympathetic to your political views than they are to mine.

Charlie Collier
July 21st, 2011 | 6:40 pm

“By the way, I think on many issues, you would find the Kochs more sympathetic to your political views than they are to mine.”

Joe, you might be confused about my political views. I’d be delighted to find out that the Kochs are prepared to put their billions in the service of a Christian discipleship that sees the Church as more genuinely political than the world, that believes that when Jesus disarmed Peter, he disarmed all Christians, and that holds that believers participate in God’s patience with the violence of the nations in the same way Jesus did (revolutionary, nonviolent subordination). I’d be genuinely thrilled to learn that Charles Koch shares my view that the culture wars are a giant distraction from, and contradiction to, the primary task of Christians to manifest in the body politics of the ecclesia the reconciling peace that God has made possible in and through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of his Son. It would be an amazing thing to learn that the Kochs agree with me that First Things’ affection for “conservatism” is as misguided as the idea that “liberalism” or “progressivism” is something Christians should bend the knee before.

I suspect you’re just playing fast and loose with the meaning of “sympathy” here.

The claim that “freedom of labor movement is not essential to economic freedom” is interesting. Neither of us would be free to do what we are currently doing if we hadn’t had the freedom to leave Texas to work elsewhere. I think this is an argument only someone currently gainfully employed would ever advance. By your account, people eager to work for the sake of bare necessities in a nation that nevertheless has no jobs for them are just as economically free as anyone else.

Pastor Spomer
July 21st, 2011 | 7:17 pm

The evil irony is that the path to poverty is paved by those who believe they are advocates for the poor.

David Nickol
July 21st, 2011 | 8:30 pm

The video implies the United States is plummeting, but here are the overall scores (Heritage Foundation, WSJ rankings) for 2011 backward to 1995

2011 78.8
2010 78.0
2009 80.7
2008 81.0
2007 81.2
2006 81.2
2005 79.9
2004 78.7
2003 78.2
2002 78.4
2001 79.1
2000 76.4
1999 75.5
1998 75.4
1997 75.6
1996 76.7
1995 76.7

R Hampton
July 21st, 2011 | 9:04 pm

RE: Labor and Movement

Pope John Paul II in the apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America:
“With this in mind, the Synod Fathers recalled that ‘the Church in America must be a vigilant advocate, defending against any unjust restriction of the natural right of individual persons to move freely within their own nation and from one nation to another. Attention must be called to the rights of immigrants and their families and to respect for their human dignity, even in cases of non-legal immigration. Migrants should be met with a hospitable and welcoming attitude which can encourage them to become part of the Church’s life, always with due regard for their freedom and their specific cultural identity…’”

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/migrants/pom2003_93/rc_pc_migrants_pom93_mcguire.html

Joe DeVet
July 21st, 2011 | 9:46 pm

Contra Hampton re nationalized health care. There is no comparison between the examples you give and the USA. Each of the countries has small populations and/or small area, and to a large degree possess very specialized economies, which could not sustain that kind of per-capita income in a country as large as ours. The economic model of Switzerland, for example, could never deliver that kind of prosperity to our 310 million people.

IN PARTICULAR, when it comes to health care, the comparison totally breaks down. The reason that such countries can get away with a national health care plan is because there is a place in the world with a large, vibrant, free economy which (because it is relatively free) has not eliminated incentives to medical R&D and innovation. Thus the US invents and moves medical tech forward, and the rest of the world benefits from the technology “fallout.” Nationalize the US medical system and you have killed that golden goose whose eggs have benefited us and the rest of the world.

Which is why Obamacare is a pox on us, and on the whole world. It must be eliminated root and branch!

J. Bob
July 22nd, 2011 | 9:39 am

Maybe the U.S. should have saved it’s $’s (for health care, etc.), and not provided foreign aid, and helped other countries oppose some very nasty people ( Hitler, Stalin, etc.).

How much of the other countries provided to the world’s poor? Wonder how much the Swiss made from the Third Reich?

Alessandra
July 22nd, 2011 | 1:03 pm

I am profoundly and radically in favor of much greater international mobility. Extremist scenarios (all open borders to everyone) are unrealistic and serve only to create a bogey man effect to frighten the masses to keep feudal barriers and structures in place.

The European Union, in my opinion, is a great example of a recent system put in place allowing for much greater international (in this case regional) mobility which brought countless benefits to many people (professionals and students).

There is no reason why a host of similar systems couldn’t be developed and implemented in various regions or for groups of countries around the world. No need to have one solution fit all. Each case could be examined and a mobility solution envisioned individually.

Human beings can always think of ways to regulate things in order to achieve more balance. There is no need to paint some chaotic, ridiculous apocalyptic scenario of “hordes” of hungry and disheveled migrants coming to invade the nice neighborhoods of other countries. (Same discourse that was used to keep segregation in the South in place for decades, BTW). The more things change, the more they stay the same…

As to the feudal country borders in place today, this something I had blogged some time ago, an updated statue of liberty motto:

It was while writing a comment critiquing libertarianism at VC* that I fetched in my memory the all too well-known motto for the statue of liberty, by Emma Lazarus:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

And I then mused that it won’t be long, given the illegal immigration problems that Americans are facing and their mostly hostile and virulent sentiments to these millions of immigrants, plus all the other ones who would like to come to America but are deterred or shot dead on the way, that I thought about a new, more current, and up-to-date motto for the statue that would very much please such aforementioned Americans:

“Please. Do not give us your poor, your tired, or your hungry. Go die somewhere else. We don’t care. Have a nice day.”

More at:
http://socimages.blogsome.com/2010/09/08/updated-statue-of-liberty-motto/

Joe Carter
July 22nd, 2011 | 1:23 pm

Alessandra “Please. Do not give us your poor, your tired, or your hungry. Go die somewhere else. We don’t care. Have a nice day.”

As Milton Friedman once said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Would you be willing to do away with all social programs in order to allow increased mobility of labor?

Alessandra
July 22nd, 2011 | 3:16 pm

Joe Carter
July 22nd, 2011 | 1:23 pm

Alessandra “Please. Do not give us your poor, your tired, or your hungry. Go die somewhere else. We don’t care. Have a nice day.”

As Milton Friedman once said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Would you be willing to do away with all social programs in order to allow increased mobility of labor?
=============
I just don’t buy that kind of question.

Did the European Union do away with all social programs as it instituted its regional cross European border mobility framework?

Not ever. The European Union is perhaps the most welfare and social program cluttered region in the world! At least, it’s one of them. And it has enormous social mobility across borders, with a ton of benefits.

This is what I was talking about conjuring up completely unrealistic, extremist catastrophic scenarios to cover up the fact that we could have much, much more international mobility, bringing a lot of benefits to enormous numbers of people without any talk of doing away with all this or all that. All it requires are solutions that are not extremist.

National borders are completely artificially constructed and determined in the first place. So are the systems for moving across them. We can have much better systems that what we have now. What we currently have is not much better than fiefdoms. Countries nowadays just have a bit more technology decorating them, but the structure is fundamentally feudal.

It’s ridiculous, it has to change.

R Hampton
July 22nd, 2011 | 4:55 pm

“As Milton Friedman once said, ‘You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.’”

FYI: That’s not the position of the RCC.

“Thus the US invents and moves medical tech forward, and the rest of the world benefits from the technology “fallout.”

Medical technology is a global business, so you can’t portray the U.S. as the singular, or even primary, source of new medical knowledge and invention. In fact, a great many hospitals in the U.S. rely on foreign doctors, educated outside of the country, to staff their facilities. Even U.S. companies that develop medical technology operate outside of the country, for example GE Healthcare.
http://www.gehealthcare.com/eueu/msabout/msabout.html

Boonton
July 25th, 2011 | 7:23 am

Why does the right seem to get off thinking other countries besides the US have more economic freedom? For example, I believe I once read Arnold Kling claim that China was the world’s most entrepneurial economy in the world. Or in this video where Signapore is listed as more free than the US. Yet the first line on wikipedia’s article on the Signaporian economy reads:

” the state owns stakes in firms that comprise perhaps 60% of the GDP through entities such as the sovereign wealth fund Temasek.[6] ”

But yet these are the same types who will claim that Obama has made the US more socialist because the gov’t will own a stake in GM for a few years.

Boonton
July 25th, 2011 | 10:51 am

“As Milton Friedman once said, ‘You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.’”

He would seem to be wrong unless you want to talk about absurd extremes. First in the US the ‘welfare state’ mostly requires you to buy into the social contract. You can’t collect Social Security or Medicare unless you worked at least ten years (and if you’ve done so why stop?). Likewise unemployment only covers you if you worked on the books and paid taxes. Medicaid is, in theory, open to anyone regardless of their work history but then that’s only helpful to you if you’re sick. It doesn’t get you a place to live or a fridge full of food or nice clothes. It helps you if you have a heart attack in the middle of the street…. Take those things off the table and you’ve removed a huge bulk of the US ‘welfare state’.

You’re left with a smattering of programs like food stamps or housing but looking at the standard of living it’s not at all clear it makes sense for the immigrant from anywhere in the world to just pack his bags and head to the US if immigration barriers were dropped. True food stamps can get an able bodied single male $60 worth of food per month. But the prices of food in the US are much higher than in developing countries.

Now on the flip side, immigrants expand GDP…even illegal ones contribute tax dollars both directly and indirectly. Both legal and illegal immigrants, for example, are healthier than the average American. So as our ‘welfare state’ moves more towards a ‘healthcare state’ adding healthy people to our mix lowers costs.

Friedman’s quip is true only for absurdly generous welfare states and absurdly open immigration policies. But it’s not clear you could really ahve an absurdly generous welfare state even with closed borders. The truth is probably a bit upside down, you can’t have a welfare state without free immigration!