Soviet-style mandates are morally repugnant, the antithesis of everything that a free society is about
BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION
Suppose I tell you that the government will design a product and make you buy it. If you say no thanks, that's too bad. The government will decide what you need and what you will buy.
If you say you can't afford it, we'll send in government investigators to check, and if they conclude indeed you can't afford it, we'll tax your neighbors and make them subsidize you so you can pay for it.
We'll set up a government bureaucracy to monitor and make sure you're cooperating. If they discover you haven't made the purchase, they'll go to your employer and have your wages garnished.
Let's assume further that total spending for this government-designed and -mandated product accounts for about a fifth of the nation's total economy.
The former Soviet Union? Communist China?
No, this is the new Hillarycare. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., having once failed to explicitly nationalize the one-fifth of our economy going to health care, now wants to slip it past us by dressing it up in drag.
Her plan is to use a federal government mandate to force every American to buy health insurance. She claims it won't violate our freedom because if you already have a private plan that's OK. But a government alternative plan will be made available.
The government will regulate health care, define acceptable health insurance and force every American to buy a plan based on the government-established standard.
Her opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, also wants vast government regulations and controls to define and price out health care. But Obama, who has the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate, grasps that, short of invoking a police state, it still must be up to consumers to decide to purchase health insurance.
This last point does not intimidate Clinton's Soviet-style affinities. When asked how purchase can be enforced, she told interviewer George Stephanopoulos, "We will have an enforcement mechanism. ... you know, going after people's wages."
Incredibly, Clinton calls her concept of government-mandated universal health coverage "a core Democratic value."
Indeed, we have a problem in the delivery of health care in our country. Costs are going up at twice the overall rate of inflation, with increasing burdens on working families.
Why have health-care costs gone out the roof when the prices of just about everything else have gone down? Because health care already has become a highly regulated, highly bureaucratized industry.
If we want cheaper and more creatively delivered health care, we need less, not more, government.
According to Dr. David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute, in 1960 about half of health-care expenditures were directly controlled by consumers. Today, it is about 15 percent. Over the same period in which consumers have relinquished control, per-capita health-care spending has quintupled and costs have skyrocketed.
When someone else is paying, individuals behave differently. In a recent book by Shannon Brownlee of the New America Foundation, "Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer," she argues that up to a third of our health-care expenditures are frivolous and ineffectual.
Beyond the pure economic calculus lies the moral question of individual responsibility and freedom.
Last year, the pharmaceutical firm Merck unleashed a state-by-state lobbying campaign to get state governments to mandate that teen-age girls receive an expensive vaccine they developed to combat the virus that causes cervical cancer.
Deemed irrelevant was the fact that this virus is transmitted overwhelmingly through promiscuous sexual behavior. Those most at risk are poor black girls, so the costs would flip over to government (taxpayers).
The core behavioral problem, immorality and promiscuity, driving the poverty and risk of the disease is not only ignored but effectively subsidized.
Our health-care ills are symptomatic of our social ills. And our social ills reflect a society where the link between personal responsibilities and costs and personal rights and benefits has been largely severed.
Soviet-style mandates like what Clinton wants will simply dig the hole into which we are sinking deeper. The approach is morally repugnant, the antithesis of everything that a free society is about, and, like the former Soviet Union, does not work.
More individual freedom, choice and responsibility in both the delivery and purchase of health care is our only hope.
Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.
Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.
2 comments:
Why don't you privatize the Police and Fire Departments while you're at it. The government can't do ANYTHING right!
Maybe even tear up all of those totally useless government roads.
The case might be made for privatization of police and fire response. However, the same privatization bang-for-the-buck probably wouldn't be there, nor would the same cost-controlling incentive inherent in keeping health care private.
For one thing, police and fire response typically operate on an emergency, immediate-need basis, where the bulk of health care needs do not need to be met immediately. The necessity of speedy and effective response tends to keep government inefficiency down, relatively speaking, because lives will end and property will be lost right before our very eyes if police/fire dept is buried in red tape. People still die from health care inefficiency, but it's typically spread out over long waiting periods where other factors can enter in and obscure the direct effect of government bureaucracy.
The cost-saving benefit of privatization also wouldn't really be a factor in police/fire privatization. With some exceptions, you don't often call for police or fire services unless you REALLY need them. I know for a fact (having spent 10 years in the military and having lived 3 years in England) that people will call on "free" health care services when they might otherwise go to the drug store on their own, or suck it up and go to work.
A good rule of thumb (one our Founders believed in) is that government should only be doing things that it can do better than people or the private sector. That list is short, but in areas such as the military and emergency response, there are a few.
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