RE: The main difference between liberals & conservatives.
I don't believe that medical care is a right. To me rights are things that you can exercise without harming your neighbor. My right to extend my fist stops where your nose begins, to repeat and oft-quoted line. So, with each right comes a responsibility to exercise it in a manner that does not interfere with the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of others. You can't do that with health care.
If I have a "right" to health care, then that obligates someone else to provide it. If that person is not compensated for having to provide it, then that person is harmed. If he/she is compensated, then someone has to pay for it. And if the person paying for it is not me, then that person is harmed.
What I do believe is that there is a neighborhood effect around basic health care. I can send my kid to school with all his/her shots, but if none of the other kids have theirs, and they're all sick all the time, and my kid is exposed to it, then my kid will most likely suffer from it at some point.
So I think there is a strong argument for universal basic health care. That's what the French and German and Dutch and Swiss systems basically provide, each in its own (and very different from the others) way.
But we can't meet every person's every health care need. The cost would be prohibitive. That's why our system costs so much more than the others. We try to meet way more needs than most of the socialized systems can. And meeting every incremental need for the 80% of the population is way, way more expensive than providing basic care for the other 20%.
You can have good health care, or you can have universal care, or you can have cheap care. But you can't have all three, and it's quite the balancing act to provide even a reasonable shot at two of them. Obamacare is trying to be cheap and universal. That means it's going to be crap care. The economics just don't work to permit otherwise. CBO has even noted this in their reports that have been spun as saying that CBO provides an independent assessment that Obamacare will reduce the budget deficit.
So if you want good health care and you want it cheap, everyone can't have it. You must have a rationing mechanism. That can be price (and usually is in our system) or it can be bureaucratic fiat (as it is in most socialized systems). The French, Germans, Dutch, and Swiss essentially provide basic care to everyone (it's cheap, so you don't need to ration it). When you get to the more advanced (and expensive) stuff, it is in effect rationed by price. You can get the care in the "free" system, but it will take a while. Or you can pay more for better insurance, and go to the "pay" system and get it done now. In France, for example, 99+% of the people are covered on the "free" system (people migrating into the country are not covered for the first couple of months, but that's about it). But 90% also buy supplemental insurance so that they are covered if they need to go to the "pay" side. So their system comes in two parts. The "free" side provides universal and cheap health care, but with obvious limits on quality; the "pay" side provides quality and relatively cheaply compared to us, but it's not universal.
That kind of approach makes a lot more sense to me than Obamacare.
(This post was last modified: 02-07-2012 08:42 PM by Owl 69/70/75.)
|
/
The main difference between liberals & conservatives.
