Spero Consulting

With Oba­macare, You May Wish it Were So

If you read The Wall Street Jour­nal only at work and don’t work on Sat­ur­days, then you may have missed a very excel­lent essay that appeared in Saturday’s edi­tion: Man vs. Mutt. In it, Theodore Dal­rym­ple, a.k.a. Anthony Daniels, com­pares Great Britain’s nation­al­ized, human health­care with its pri­vate vet­eri­nary care for dogs. It is well worth reading.

As you might guess, care for canines comes out on top.

Here are a few lines that we par­tic­u­larly like: “…for equal­ity has the con­no­ta­tion not only of jus­tice, but of hard­ship and suf­fer­ing. And, as every­one knows, it is eas­ier to spread hard­ship equally that to dis­sem­i­nate bless­ings equally.” And, “…I mean no dis­re­spect to the proper func­tion of gov­ern­ment when I say that gov­ern­ment con­trol, espe­cially when highly cen­tral­ized, can sap the will even of highly moti­vated peo­ple to do their best.”

Mr. Dal­rym­ple notes that even indi­gent dogs receive health­care in Great Britain. We’ve often made a sim­i­lar point about human health­care in the USA. While not every­one has insur­ance, just about every­one who needs it and seeks it can find care.

Cur­rently, we with insur­ance pay for those with­out it. With more gov­ern­ment med­dling, we’ll still pay for those with­out it, but we’ll also pay for legions of new gov­ern­ment bureau­crats who do lit­tle of value, i.e, they “admin­is­ter,” say, the 110,000 pages of Medicare regulations.

In fact, in our mind, pay­ing for those bureau­crats leaves less money for actual care and that leads to rationing and less care for every­one, includ­ing the indi­gent. (By the way, how many of our “indi­gent” lack cell phones, cig­a­rettes, and calo­ries? Much of liv­ing is a mat­ter of choice, includ­ing — or espe­cially — obe­sity, which is far more preva­lent among the indi­gent than the wealthy or middle-​class.)

So, we ask: why is dimin­ished care for all prefer­able to the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion where insured tax-​payers pay for the unin­sured? (See Like the State Liquor Stores? You’ll Love Obama’s Health­care! and When Dupli­ca­tion of Effort Saves Money, which is sub­ti­tled, “The High Cost of Cen­tral­iza­tion at the Defense Depart­ment,” for sim­i­lar notions.)

One answer that we’ve received is that it is demean­ing for the indi­gent to seek such char­ity, and those hurt feel­ings should be elim­i­nated. We think that folks are a bit too sen­si­tive, and while some may suf­fer from such embar­rass­ment, per Mr. Dal­rym­ple, why replace it with a sys­tem that is demean­ing to every­one? More­over, why replace it with a sys­tem that also pro­vides infe­rior and delayed and expen­sive care to all?

Finally, as we asked in our defense depart­ment essay, why replace flawed, fail­ing, and expen­sive cen­tral­ized sys­tems like Medicare and Med­ic­aid, with (a lot) more of the same?