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| Can Conservatives Show That "We Care?" | S-CHIP and Sacrifice |
The End of Socialized Medicine?
by Christopher Chantrill
October 30, 2007 at 4:48 am
MICHAEL Moore’s SiCKO is opening in Britain this week, but the British are not amused. Anyone can extol the virtues of universal government-furnished health care, they say, when they have never had to use it. Writes Minette Marrin in the London Times:
You would never guess from Sicko that the NHS [National Health Service] is in deep trouble, mired in scandal and incompetence, despite the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.
Not to worry, writes Peter Huber in “Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine” in City Journal. The new age of “molecular medicine,” of designer drugs for specific genetic defects, is going to break up the current system of government universal health care that Michael Moore so loves.
It all goes back to 1987 when Ben and Jerry’s introduced the Cherry Garcia, a monument to unhealthy eating habits. But, writes Huber,
The Food and Drug Administration struck back three months later when it approved the first of a new family of statin drugs that curb cholesterol production in the human liver.
The new molecular medicine will not just curb nasty things in the human body, he asserts. It will destroy the political consensus for universal health care.
Our current health care system is built upon the extraordinary success of the war against germ-carried disease. Water-borne diseases like cholera and airborne diseases like tuberculosis lend themselves to sweeping governmental action and one-size-fits-all programs. After all, “Cholera killed a duchess as easily as a flower girl.” Sweeping programs of sanitation and vaccination became the stock-in-trade of every politician and bureaucrat.
But in the new health order of drugs and gene warfare things are not so simple.
The designer drugs of molecular medicine are specific and individual. They aim to correct specific genetic deficiencies and compensate for unhealthy life habits. Thus, says Huber:
Disease and its cures now depend on factors too fragmented for conventional insurance pools to contain, too costly for public treasuries to underwrite, and too divisive for public authorities even to discuss, much less manage.
Pretty soon a president will come along and promise to end government health care as we know it.
Maybe she will. But it is likely that first we will test the universal health care system paradigm to destruction.
When things go wrong, political leaders and their leading experts is to resort first of all to compulsion and prohibition rather than letting markets and the consumer decide. Right now they have fatties in their sights.
Morbidly obese people in their fifties are costing the government a ton of money by coming into government hospitals to get bariatric surgery and hip and knee transplants. The obvious thing to do is to stop restaurants and food stores from selling them the evil fatty foods that have fueled their enormity.
That’s why nanny Mayor Bloomberg has forced restaurants to remove “trans-fat” from their menus in New York City. Reports Tom Elliott:
Bloomberg believes "Public-information campaigns are insufficient. In the realm of public health, law really does the work."
He means that the government wants to force you to be healthy.
No doubt the only sensible course is to privatize health care and allow the market to perform its miracles, as Peter Huber suggests.
But Michael Moore and his slacker-liberal army would fight to the last mockumentary to stop that. They have a right to free and unlimited health care and they know it.
You might wonder why they make such a fuss. After all, Huber writes,
Three-dollar statins in New York in 1996 get 30-cent statins to London in 2006 and three-cent statins to Kuala Lumpur a few years later.
But that’s not good enough for our progressive friends. They want three-cent statins now. Anything less is a triumph of greed over human need.
Most Americans are not slacker liberals. But they don’t see why they should pay as much in monthly payments for drugs as they do for the family SUV.
They are moderates. That means that they will vote for a moderate amount of compulsion and expropriation to solve the next crisis in health care. It’s a practical thing. When they or their loved ones need an expensive procedure or designer drug, they know that cost should be not be a factor, at least not for them.
That’s why it would be prudent not to place any bets on the end of socialized medicine any time soon.
Instead, we should expect it to lurch from one disaster to the next.
It’s encouraging to think that Hillary Clinton is uniquely qualified, by education, temperament, experience, and plain dumb luck to be the US leader fated to test universal health insurance to destruction.
After she and her wrecking crew have finished then we can start to build a health care system that really works.
Meanwhile there is always medical tourism.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.
To email the author, click here.
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Living Under Law
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Knowledge
Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its
characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then,
once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Democratic Capitalism
I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
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