More discussion on the health care debate. Well reasoned, and logical. Unlike most of what I have read across wordpress, and other blog websites.
No, 47 million Americans are not permanently unable to obtain health insurance. This oft-cited, sensationalized statistic is a snapshot at any point in time, something akin to saying 50 million Americans may have a head cold at any point in time but soon get over it.
The Census Bureau reports that in 2007, more than 250 million Americans (85 percent of the population) had either private insurance or were enrolled in a government health program such as Medicare, Medicaid or SCHIP. The uninsured include those between jobs, students just out of school and millions of foreign-born, many of whom are here illegally. The average family that loses its health insurance is reinsured within six months; 75 percent are reinsured within a year. The largest group of longer-term uninsured is younger people who are healthy and can afford insurance but choose to gamble.
The serious problems are confined to about 15 million people, less than 5 percent of the population, who can’t afford insurance or are uninsurable because of pre-existing conditions. These problems are manageable within our existing health care system rather than spending trillions on Obamacare to create a bureaucratic nightmare.
Health care is not a fundamental “right” in our society. The unalienable rights cited in the Declaration of Independence are life, liberty and the “pursuit” (not the delivery) of happiness. The Preamble to the Constitution speaks of “promoting” the general welfare, not providing it. The Bill of Rights delineates a series of fundamental rights that individuals possess, by nature, and that government shall not infringe. Free health care is not one of them. If it were, it could only be delivered to one person by forcing another to provide it. And that would be a violation of the provider’s individual rights. When you exercise your right of free speech, religious worship or assembly, it imposes no obligation on anyone else.
If someone is indigent, we don’t let him die on the sidewalk outside a hospital. We treat that person, as we should. We’ll even send an ambulance to get him. But whether the money to pay for this comes from taxpayers, private benefactors or by shifting the cost to other patients, it’s still charity. Health care isn’t a right. Neither are food stamps, housing subsidies or welfare. They’re all charity. When the government refers to these benefits as “entitlements,” it’s because the recipients are granted them by statute, not as rights.
Food, clothing, shelter and health care are essential to maintain life, but individual Americans enjoy different levels in the quality of all those things in our market economy based on their ability to purchase them. This strikes some people as unfair, by the socialist definition of that term. Is it fair that people with more money can afford better homes, better cars, buy more expensive clothes and eat at more expensive restaurants? Is it fair that a rich man can afford the best lawyers in the country while an indigent defendant gets only a court-appointed public defender?
Of course it is, because individuals have earned those benefits, and because there’s no practical alternative. Distributing homes, cars, lawyers or health care via a random lottery isn’t practical; it’s socialism. And socialism is doomed to failure because it lacks incentives and rewards for individual productivity and excellence. In the absence of that, it ultimately collapses when it runs out of the means to spend other people’s money.
The same reasoning applies to health care. “Universal care,” as President Barack Obama envisions it, would throw everyone in the same pit. We’d all become charity cases. Demand for medical care would soar, and supply would unavoidably be rationed. We’d sacrifice the world’s highest quality health care system for the great majority of Americans to a socialist model that will improve the lot of a few at the expense of the many. Very bad idea.
Mike Rosen’s radio show airs week- days from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.
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