The effort to reinvent medical care is so full of fallacies and bad logic that it would take volumes to properly expose them. Nevertheless, in this short space, let’s take a crack atsome of the problems.
To begin, the “reformers” want to compel insurers to cover people who are already sick for the same price healthy people pay. But if someone is already sick, no government plan to pay his medical bills can be accurately called “insurance.” Insurance is a voluntary way to spread risk. Risk comes from uncertainty. But someone already sick doesn’t face a risk that he might need medical attention for his ailment. He is certain to require the attention. There’s a reason you can’t buy homeowner’s insurance after your house has burned down or life insurance for a deceased person. Why should one expect to be able to buy insurance to cover medical treatment for a disease one already has contracted? When private donors voluntarily pay the bills, we call it charity or philanthropy or benevolence. When government pays them after extracting money by force from taxpayers or by requiring insurance companies to overcharge healthy people who are compelled to buy coverage, we should call it (at the very least) welfare.
If someone wants to defend medical welfare, let him do so. But don’t let him get away with calling it insurance. He not only does violence to the language; he also clouds the discussion. This is another application of the tacit premise that no one should have to pay for his own medical care. Bastiat’s line about the state being the means by which we all try to live at everyone else’s expense comes to mind...
Finally, the way to rig a debate over public policy is to never acknowledge the only genuine alternative to your proposal. Obama says, “I’m confident that when people look at the costs of doing nothing they’re going to say, we can make this happen.” Why is “doing nothing” the alternative to a conscious attempt to reinvent the healthcare industry? While it is true that doing nothing would be preferable to what Obama and his congressional allies want to do, it is not the best alternative. The best alternative is the free market. But have you ever heard the advocates of government control offer an argument against the free market? The answer is no, and the reason is that to argue against it would be to acknowledge it as an alternative. And that they cannot afford to do. Better to have the people think we already have a free market in medicine and that it has failed. That way they will be more likely to win support for government control. The “reformers’” task would be more difficult if people understood that what has created the problems is government, not the free market.
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