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?
