Here’s a short article that outs the truth about the Democrats’ health care strategy. They know the “reform” isn’t going to save money. They also know that it’s a huge leap with unpredictable consequences. But they don’t care, and their moment, they know, is now. For them, the issue is less about quality and cost than about being more equitable–putting everyone in the same boat. And so their goal is creating a huge and irreversible new entitlement that will make the middle class far more dependent on government. That will be permanent good news for the BIG GOVERNMENT party. The reason for the present Republican surge is that this isn’t change that most Americans believe in, although it is change they voted for (at least if any of them gave a moment’s thought to the more or less inevitable policy consequences of their votes for Obama and a Democratic Congress).
I note that, on the Front Porcher site, there’s a divide on this issue. Mark Mitchell wants health care deregulated and decentralized; he’s for localist subsidiarity. But Russell Fox has no objection to the nationalization of health care. He’s a Christian Democrat, after all, and that’s the way they do stuff in the European countries that recently were ruled and socially democratically reformed by Christian Democrats.
National health care is more Christian and loving or less capitalist, the thought is. It’s good to to use government to keep people from having to worry about what health care costs; health care is what every dignified being needs and deserves. But one problem among many is that Europe hasn’t been Christian Democratic for a while. And whatever the virtues of their health care plans, everyone knows they’re not sustainable demographically for much longer.
We Americans, at this point, will be spared the pain the post-Christian and post-democratic Europeans will experience when they’re stuck with weaning themselves off entitlements they’ve become very used to and can no longer afford. There might have been a real argument for us reforming in their direction in, say, 1958. But not now!
The genuinely subsidiarity-minded Porchers should be the most extreme opponents of the Pelosi/Obama health care reforms, even if they voted Obamacon out of anti-Bush spite or misty cultural concerns. Everyone knows that the EU has turned the idea of subsidiarity into a cruel joke for Europeans.
I’m all for subsidiarity as described by our philosopher-pope. And that’s why I’m not big on European cradle-to-grave dependence on government. In our country, for example, people still think, studies show, that old people are primarily the responsibility of their families, while in Europe people think the burden has primarily devolved to the government.
November 10th, 2009 | 9:47 am
That account of the underlying motiviation strikes me as dead on–the arguments about cost have always been almost openly insincere although the argument regartding increased efficiency is often quite sincere, revealing a characteristic optimism about bureaucratic planning. Still, one could argue, as our Pope does in his latest encyclical, that the approach genuinely consistent with subsidiarity is, in fact, the Christian approach, and that European statism was therefore only sort of Christian in design.
November 10th, 2009 | 10:26 am
The last par of the post is now a clarification on the basis of Ivan’s good comment.
November 10th, 2009 | 11:35 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Howard Rose, John Newsom. John Newsom said: Health Care Strategery http://bit.ly/3JoiIY [...]
November 10th, 2009 | 1:37 pm
Unless I have my facts wrong, what puzzles me about the US Health Care proposal as it currently stands is that the poor are forced to buy insurance of face. I don’t see how this is entitlement. It seems like telling a drowning person, “You wouldn’t be drowning if you just started swimming”.
As a Canadian, I value our health care. It’s not entitlement any more than having fresh drinking water is entitlement and sanitary streets, and adequate police protection is entitlement. All are part of the well-being of a society. Of course, there are many parts of the world where such basics are luxuries, so everything we take for granted is an entitlement.
That being said, there are consequences when the government takes over health (some good, some bad):
1) Since the government pays the bills, they’re interested in reducing costs. This results in:
1a) Promotion of healthy lifestyles
1b) Focusing on prevention
1c) Focusing on early detection
1d) Passing laws that reduce lifestyles that harm health (e.g. smoking, fatty foods, etc)
1e) Increased co-operation between hospitals to reduce costs.
2) Since public money pays for health, “the spirit of the age” can cause moral problems for which there are no alternatives. (For example, the Salvation Army Hospitals have been forced to close down their maternity wards, since it is a requirementment that if you have a maternity ward, then you must carry out abortions. There is no choice about asking for an exception and no appeal to “yes but the first hospitals were started by Christians and the original Hypocratic Oath, which all our doctors agree to, forbids abortions” or “noone would go to the Salvation Army Hospital if they wanted an abortion”. No. It’s either you close down your maternity ward or close down the hospitals.)
November 10th, 2009 | 2:46 pm
Because of Obama’s socialized medicine scheme doctors will receive less income and will, consequently, work less.
A federal bureaucrat will determine the life span of you and your loved ones, and will be responsible for shortening their life span. And, you will do nothing about it.
Obama and the federalis will put you in jail for not adhereing to their socialized medicine scheme.
Medicare will lose half a trillion dollars in budgeted spending because of this legislation, consequently the elderly will receive less and less medical care.
Obama and the Democrat’s are introducing legislation that will leave our children and grandchildren little more than serfs, as wards of the state, and we do nothing.
If Democrats are replaced by Republicans and independents in the next couple of elections, they will not role back this socialized medicine scheme.
November 10th, 2009 | 6:35 pm
As a Confounded Porcher, go ahead take your shots. A good summary here Lawler…the “cost” issue will never be addressed no matter how much they assert it is their basic aim. As to Kenneally, he sums it up perfectly …”sort of Christian”. Kind of like this country being “sort of a Republic”.
Just like the Republicans nose-diving as a consequence of a weak opponent, so too will be the Democrat’s denouement. One wonders how much more of this “centrism” we can afford.
November 10th, 2009 | 6:57 pm
Well, thats a relief. I thought the government might try to control costs through distorting the drug market in ways that discourage investments in new drugs, seek to ration care indirectly through longer waiting periods, or give out treatments based on criteria decided by a committee that determines one’s quality of life compared to the costs of the treatment. It is especially rich to hear the more radical pro-choicers who are also social democrats complain about the Stupak rule. They expected that in government-run healthcare, the government would make healthcare policy, but it never seemed to have occurred to them that the policies might sometimes be more Mike Huckabee than Nancy Pelosi. I am especially interested in when we had the spirit of the age elections in which we decided that Christian hospitals must perform abortions or close down and have all their good work destroyed.
But Ivan is right that when many liberals talk about government-run healthcare being both more fair, and more cost effective, and offering better care, they are being painfully honest. William Schambra (in National Affairs) quotes Obama as suggesting that “a nonpartisan group like the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine determine what a basic, high-quality health-care plan should look like and how much it should cost,” We should be open to the possibility that Obama really does not know what is problematic with what he just said. We should not assume that all liberals (least of all the President) buy into Hayek’s ideas about decentralized decision making and price incetives. Many either know nothing about those ideas or think of Hayek as the guy who thought that any social programs lead to totalitarianism. More is the pity.
December 7th, 2009 | 5:36 pm
[...] Lawler, who himself isn’t much of localist or populist, takes profound exception to this possibility, arguing, contra my own Christian Democratic sympathies, that “genuinely [...]
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