Healthcare Is Now More Important Than Property Rights
Let’s be honest with ourselves, liberty isn’t all that important anymore.
Liberty, the ability for the individual to act as he or she sees fit, without outside coercion, has been dead for a century or more, so why do we keep playing lip service to it?
Let’s look at the recent health care debate for a minute. I won’t take long.
You have one very large group of people who feel everyone deserves to be taken care of when they are sick. You have another very large group of people who feel that they’re not entirely comfortable with the idea of working hard to pay to take care of someone else.
The first group has the best interests of everyone at heart. They want everyone to be taken care of when they are sick, or injured, or in pain. They don’t want to pass people on the street, dying of appendicitis because they cannot pay a doctor to fix the problem. They don’t want people to lose their homes because they paid a doctor to fix a problem and now can’t afford to pay the doctor.
The second group doesn’t want any of that either. However, they also don’t feel that they should have money taken out of their pockets to pay to fix the situation. The second group respects liberty and hates coercion. They feel that perhaps some of the people who are in bad situations are in bad situations healthcare-wise because of bad choices that they made. They realize that some people who are in bad situations healthcare-wise because of circumstances beyond their own control.
Sometimes people from both groups help those less-fortunate people with money, time or other resources, but not enough to completely alleviate the problem.
So the first group has decided that everyone is now going to chip in and work for a portion of the year in order to try to fix the problem of some people not being able to afford to go to a doctor. This, over the objections of the second group, who is just as numerous as the first.
So who is right? Who is moral in this situation?
The answer to that question lies in what is more important to the people involved in the argument. Is either liberty or security more important?
The only honest way to phrase that argument is to put it in the starkest terms – are we willing to all be slaves so that some of us will have an easier time of it?
The most important aspect of liberty is the presence and enforcement of property rights. You have the right to earn what you can as best as you can. You have the right to do nothing if you choose. You do not have the right to take someone else’s property, or time, because once someone is having their property (or time) unwillingly confiscated for someone else’s good, that person is a slave for the portion of time that it took to earn/build that property.
If you infringe on property rights you have decided that in order to preserve the life and liberty of X, you will violate the life and liberty of Y. And once you go down that road, it means you don’t really care about life or liberty – you just favor X over Y for some reason.
You have oversimplified this topic to an extraordinary degree. Unfortunately health care reform is neither simple nor about paying anyone else’s way. Health care reform is about sanity. Why let the insurance companies regulate themselves? You’re a smart guy, explain the wisdom of that to me. How can you justify the expense of some of these procedures? It reminds me on the government paying $3000 for a hammer all those years ago and the huge scandal that exposed. remember that?
Open your eyes. This issue has nothing to do with altruism. Altruism is a side effect. It’s about sanity. Your article misses the point entirely. All you have to say on the issue is “blah blah blah”. Yawn.
Ultimately any argument can be drilled down to a few simple viewpoints.
Health care is very simple. It follows the law that every other commodity follows – the law of supply and demand. Here, let me wiki it for you: Law of Supply and Demand.
Now, in order to reduce prices, we can do one of two things. We can increase the supply of what we want (more doctors, more insurance providers) – or we can artificially reduce prices (price fixing, usually via government fiat). Both will accomplish the goal of reducing prices, but only one is valid as a long-term solution.
Now, if you were a large insurance company with a good hold on the market, what would you like to do? Eliminate competition and reduce supply! It’s profitable to be the only game in town. And, to eliminate competition, you can:
a) provide a product that everyone wants at a price they want to pay and drive unfit competition out of the market
b) have an outside source raise the barrier of entry
We’re choosing b) far too often.
You ask how I justify the expense of some of these procedures? Mostly insurance and doctors fighting for control over what they’re able to charge. Lack of competition in the insurance marketplace. High demand for top-quality care and lots of subsidized dollars chasing the few providers. Remember, high demand and low supply always, always leads to high prices – unless you have price fixing by an outside source. It can be a huge hand artificially holding down one side of the scale, but it can only hold on for so long.
And who are you to tell a doctor what he or she can charge?
If you want to operate for free, then you go to medical school, pass the exams and get licensed (incidentally, another barrier of entry that lessens competition and raises prices.) Don’t tell a doctor what prices are fair. The market will decide that, and it will only be a fair price if it’s a real, free market.
I am not going to argue about this any longer. All you need to do is spend an hour Googling us health care vs world for solid data from reputable sources. Way better than I could do within the confines of a blog comments section. You won’t, because you really don’t care about discussion and truth, you just want to “win” by proving you’re right.
Whatever, I am going to go watch Robot Chicken now.
Aren’t life’s little victories grand? Congratulations, winner.
Lankton’s ‘Google polling’ for truth. I wonder if it works for moral choices as well. Far from oversimplifying this ugly state of affairs, CM, you have clarified it.