Balancing the Common Good with Freedom - Health Care

One of my more daring/foolish exploits in the blogosphere is actively engaging with liberals.  Sometimes, I learn something.  Sometimes, we merely butt heads.  And sometimes, I suspect that said liberals begin to understand.  At least that's the reason I keep going.  The rest of this post is dedicated, and to a degree, a response to a discussion I had on The Swash Zone yesterday.  It was about 6 liberals vs me, and I had to fit work into that, then go get kids.  Not that I ran out of steam, just time.  This is my general response....

Most on the left cite an overwhelming public interest in the passage of the current form of health care/health insurance reform.  In the ensuing discussion, many on the right face non-starter responses and occasionally irrational arguments.  Let me try to address them:

The Rationing discussion - Anything in finite supply is rationed.  Health care is currently rationed, in a hybrid system of classic supply and demand, a messy 3rd party system with numerous flaws, and some government insanity.   Obviously, the current system is a mess.  But the question is in which direction do we go:  A system where the government becomes increasingly in control of the minutiae of payment and treatment (the current plan) or a system where it comes back to free individuals (with a government safety net the likely result)?

Until we can agree that both sides want the same end (coverage for as many Americans as possible (all can never happen)), we're going to continue to spin some wheels.


The Rest of the Civilized world - Now one argument that seems to be flung out is that the rest of the civilized world has government-controlled health care.  I've looked at the situations in many of those countries.  I've noted a few things.  First, the countries with the most centralized health care (The British and Canadians) appear to be quickly reaching the point where their system can no longer sustain itself.  In fact, Canada is slowly in the process of rolling back some of the government monopoly to allow people the freedom to pay for their own health care (this being the fear of what we're headed toward).  Compare that with France, which has more of a hybrid system.  They seem to still be sustainable.  Yet, their cradle-to-grave quasi-socialist system is producing increased unemployment, decreased productivity, and is creating more strain on the system.

And none of those countries are as big or have as much effect on the world as the United States.  As i have tried to clarify, our biggest problem, and the one that has led our health care to the mess that it is, is that we stopped taking personal responsibility for our health care.  And in the current system, most people can no longer do so.  Again, it comes down to moving the responsibility and control toward a government model, or decentralizing it back into an individual system.

While we should certainly look at things in other countries that work, we must also remember who we are, and how we differ culturally from these other countries.

Government already "provides" so much - I know.  That's the central issue we have wrangled with as a country since our inception:  What is the appropriate level of control for the federal, state, and local government over our lives.  In the beginning, we strove to be as decentralized as possible.  Starting with the Constitution, we have moved slowly to a more centralized form of government, with no significant moves to distributing the power back to the people who are most trustworthy:.  The individual as a whole, with the only constraint being the equality of all under the law.

We live in an age where EVERYTHING has a federal program or office doing something to regulate or control it.  That's not necessarily a good thing in many cases.  It's certainly at the heart of our current financial, military, and social messes.  It's why any health care reform from anyone sane accepts the fact that the government will be there in some form.  But we've seen both parties pile on the programs.  And one thing I've seen in common from both the left and right is that we're pissed about our politicians, and the government in general, trying to control facets of our lives!

If we can agree that more government control is not a good thing, then we can continue finding a solution to the mess.

You don't care about sick people, you want to protect BIIIIIG BUSINESS (hiss, hiss) - I've heard this from a few quarters, most prominently, President Obama, most vehemently, the idiot Rep Alan Grayson.  To those who honestly believe this, and more specifically, those who say something along these lines out of a desire to win an argument, I have crafted an appropriate response:

Go fuck yourself with a scalpel, you manipulative shits:  You self-righteous bastards think you are the only fucking saints who give a shit about people?  I gauran-damn-tee you are about as wrong as a public Obama/Ron Paul double Dutch rudder session would be (I had to take the anger out of this statement a little).

It's easy to look at one side of an argument and say: Hey, they have more than I do.  I want to have the government we both have use their gun to take from them and give to me.   But where do you draw that line?  At what point does it go from a necessity to an attempt to reengineer society into the failed socialist model?  It comes down to morality.  Government is the only entity that can legally take money from people.  And while some targets are easy to attack (tobacco companies, for example), to condemn them as the greatest evil in the world, punish them with continued settlements, force them to not advertise their product, put labels on it telling people that it'll kill them, then tax the shit out of the people that use it is hypocrisy.  One thing to note:  I'm not a fan of habitual cigarette use, and it is bad as shit for you, but I'm forced to defend the companies simply because if it's acceptable to hound an industry out of business (rather than just ban the product, 18th Amendment style), then it's acceptable to do that to any industry.  It's the same with any right.  Larry Flynt, for example.  He won in the Supreme court when they upheld his right to produce obscene shit.  Good.  While I'm certain many people find his stuff objectionable (I'm a perv, so....), protecting the rights of one individual from the mob rule (democracy) is the cornerstone of our government.  A corporation is an individual entity in this sense, and more importantly, it's made up of many people.  Why should they be held up at gunpoint because another person needs something?  There are ways to allow them to continue doing what they do, and still take care of the needs of those who can't take care of their own.  The answer lies there.

Now look, we can't fix the problem if we don't agree that the problem needs fixed.  Those that don't come to the table wanting to find a solution, well, we ignore them.  However, finding a way to agree on how we solve the many problems is the real challenge.  If you can respect the fact that we want as little of the government involved as possible, then we'll be glad to give in other areas, especially where deception and dishonesty are tolerated now in the insurance industry.

This debate, as always, comes down to a fight over government power versus individual freedom.  And my default position will always take me toward the latter.  And if we can have a civilized debate and respect that both sides want the same end, that going to any extreme or betting on a one-size-fits-none solution is a bad idea, and that the people that are crafting these changes can't be trusted to get it right without us giving them unprecedented amounts of shit, then we can begin to correct our mistakes of ages past, and solve the health care mess once and for all.