The morality of healthcare.
One of the primary arguments promoting universal/single-payer healthcare (or the Orwellian termed government “option,” as Obama calls it) regards the supposed morality of such a system. The purpose, of course, is to shame opponents of the option. The notion is nonsense.
To emphasize that see how the British system of rationing health care decreed (meaning, those bureaucrats were unelected representatives of U.K. citizens’ health) that a human life was worth no more than $22,000 in a six-month period.
Similarly, Mark Steyn reflects on a Quebec, Canada, man named Gerald Augustin, “who went to the St. André medical clinic complaining of stomach pain.”
He’d forgotten to bring his government medical card, so they turned him away. He was a Quebecker born and bred, and he was in their computer. But no card, no service: That’s just the way it is. So he went back home to get it and collapsed of acute appendicitis, and by the time the ambulance arrived he was dead. He was 21 years old, and he didn’t make it to 22 because he was forced to accept the right of a government bureaucrat to refuse him medical treatment for which he and his family have been confiscatorily taxed all their lives. “I don’t see what we did wrong,” said the administrator. “We just followed the rules.” No big deal, M. Augustin wasn’t anything special; no one in the clinic even remembered giving him the brush.
Roy Romanow, the Canadian politician who headed the most recent of the innumerable inquiries into problems with the system, defends the state’s monopoly on the grounds that “Canadians view medicare [as their system is called] as a moral enterprise, not a business venture.” If the St. André clinic were a business venture, they’d have greeted M. Augustin with: “You’ve got stomach pains? Boy, have we hit the jackpot! Let’s get you some big-ticket pills and sign you up for surgery!” But because it’s a moral enterprise they sent him away with a flea in his ear. If you have a bad experience in a private system, there’s always another doctor, another clinic, another hospital five miles up the road. But when the government monopoly denies you health care, that’s it: Go home and wait — or, like M. Augustin, die.
“Morality” is always the justification. Inaugurating Britain’s National Health Service on July 5, 1948, the health minister, Nye Bevan, crowed: “We now have the moral leadership of the world.” That’s how Obamacare is being sold: Even the New York Times reports (in paragraph 38) that 77 percent of Americans are content with their health care. But they feel bad about all those poor uninsured waifs earning 75 grand a year. So it will make us all feel better if the government “does something.” Not literally “feel better”: We’ll be feeling sicker, longer, in dirtier waiting rooms. But our disease-ridden bodies will be warmed by the glow of knowing we did the right thing.
What’s so moral about relieving the citizen of responsibility for his own health care? If free citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are not prepared to make provision for their own health, what other core responsibilities of functioning adulthood are they likely to forgo? Oh, Smith and Jones can still be entrusted to make their own choices about which movie to rent from Netflix, or which breakfast cereal to eat. For the moment. But you’d be surprised how quickly the “right” to health care elides into the government’s right to tell you how to live in order to access that health care. A government-directed medical system can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state undertakes to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing your needing treatment in the first place — or declining to treat you if you persist in your deviancy: Smokers in Manchester, England, have been refused treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk have been told they’re ineligible for hip and knee replacements. With a staff of 1.4 million, England’s National Health Service is supposedly the third-biggest employer on the planet, after the Chinese army (2.3 million) and Indian National Railways (1.5 million). And those couple of million Chinese and Indians are mere drops in oceans each over a billion strong, not a significant chunk of the adult population of a tiny strip of land in the North Atlantic. But the NHS still has to ration treatment. Patricia Hewitt, the former health secretary, says there’s nothing wrong with the state forbidding treatment on the basis of “lifestyle choices.” And apparently the “pro-choice” types who jump up and down in the street demanding that you keep your rosaries off their ovaries are entirely relaxed about the government getting its bureaucratics all over your lymphatics.
Ultimately, it’s not the nationalization of health care but the nationalization of your body. Right now, if you want an MRI, it’s between you and your doctors. In a government-run system, if you want an MRI and you can’t get one, it’s the government’s fault. And the government should do something about it. Not give you the MRI, of course (that’s too obvious, as well as too expensive), but at least introduce a new Patient’s Bill of Rights, as Gordon Brown’s just done, promising every Briton the “right” to hospital treatment within 18 weeks. Or your (tax) money back? Ah, well, no, but the prime minister’s charter will also give you “guaranteed access to cancer treatments,” as well as “the right to die at home,” which sounds a bit as if Mr. Brown were covering himself. Scotland’s cancer survival rate is 40 percent, compared with America’s 63 percent. So if the other 60 percent of Scots all exercise their right to die at home, that might free up some “guaranteed access” for the remainder. And if it doesn’t, the prime minister will perhaps introduce a new helpline — 1-800-PATIENT — in which all you have to do is punch in your postal code and some bureaucrat will come on the line to explain that the new cancer survival targets for your area will be introduced circa 2012 and please call back then if you’re not dead.