PERILS OF 'PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY'

 

 

 

Rudy Takala
September 29, 2007
NewsWithViews.com

“Sometimes the pain was so bad, I would just cry. I didn’t know what else to do.”

That was the third paragraph of a front-page, Sept. 14 story on healthcare run in the New York Times. They were the words of a Chinese immigrant who wasn’t able to work, and so immigrated to San Francisco last year. The city is the first in the nation to attempt providing universal healthcare coverage, and, according to the story, is “the latest attempt by state and local governments to patch a [sic] inadequate federal system.”

The media is screaming for universal health care. Democrats are enthusiastically voicing agreement, while Republican politicians struggle to find Republican-sounding words that mean the same thing. Both parties support government interventionism, even though it promises to aggravate the problem.

When Romney was governor in 2005, he said that forcing everyone to have medical insurance was “a conservative idea” and said it equated only to "insisting that individuals have responsibility for their own health care.”

“I don't like calling it universal coverage…. I call it a personal responsibility system,” said Romney at the time.

Details as to what his plans will be as president are hazy. By contrast, Barack Obama and John Edwards have promised to, in effect mystically, come up with the funds to insure 47 million people who are currently uninsured by 2012. Hillary Clinton aims to have universal health coverage in place by the end of her second term. She has yet to release the details, but aides say her plan would require insurance companies to accept all applicants for coverage and would limit insurers' ability to charge higher premiums because of preexisting conditions.

If, as Hillary proposes, insurers are forced to come out at a loss on certain people, they’ll need to raise their prices on everyone. Compensating for the price increase will require government subsidies of one nature or another. Unfortunately, different countries have already tried numerous variations of this plan, and they have all consistently led to greater and greater failures.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an association of thirty democratic nations, including the United States. According to their data, “health spending has grown faster than GDP in every OECD country except Finland between 1990 and 2004. It accounted for 7% of GDP… in 1990 but reached 8.9% in 2004.” Unsurprisingly, “the bulk of healthcare costs [in these countries] are financed through taxes, with 73% of health spending on average publicly funded in 2004.”

Government subsidization of health care makes it affordable regardless of how much it costs, which means that price can keep going up without adversely affecting demand. It also makes it an absurdly-used luxury product.

Nicholas Vardy of The Global Guru pointed out that in Sweden, more than 70% of the Stockholm chapter of the Hell’s Angels “went on disability pay after the same doctor had certified them all as suffering from depression.”

The United States must follow suit, say Democrats who refuse to note the failures of other countries. As Mitt Romney explained in a September 15th story of the Associated Press, Republicans agree. "Let me tell ya, if we don't do it, the Democrats will.” We need to subsidize retirement for the Hell’s Angels, or the Democrats will.

If the candidates were really interested in improving the system, they would work to deregulate it. Regulation costs the economy an estimated $1 trillion per year; according to the CATO institute, about $169 billion of that is the cost of regulations affecting the health care industry. Tort reform would be the number one cost-saver. Reforming the FDA and selected access-oriented health insurance regulations (e.g., mandated health benefits) are numbers two and three on that list.

According to the study, the $169 million that health regulation is costing is probably causing more than 22,200 deaths every year.

Forbes Magazine once described national health insurance as “combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the IRS… and the cost accounting of the Pentagon.” Perplexingly, we are on the path to facing a bureaucracy of precisely this nature. I look forward to finding a candidate with the courage to acknowledge that.

Sources:

1, "I don't like calling it universal coverage"
2, OECD Data
3, Nicholas Vardy
4, "If we don't do it"
5, CATO Study

© 2007 Rudy Takala - All Rights Reserved