Are we feeling libertarian today?
Despite my enthusiasm for picking apart self-contradictory liberal positions, I’m obviously a raving liberal queen who votes entirely for Democratic candidates and thinks that “voting for the person, not the party” is a childish delusion.
And yet, there’s always that rhetorically beautiful tug of libertarianism. Come on, who can get through the Libertarian platform without reading themselves in there?
I had mostly forgotten about this nettlesome ideological internal conflict until I started reading the Homeland Stupidity weblog. (My obsession with hating the TSA made this inevitable.)
So of course I cherished their every word, until they started ranting about California Communists passing single-payer health care. Yikes. I kind of automatically disagree with that sentiment, because I detest whatever you want to call the way we do things now.
As a working person with “good” insurance and all that, it’s hard enough for me to see a doctor that I just don’t. Phone calls, paperwork, rules, co-pays… wtfe. Don’t even get me started about the dentist. The whole thing is a disgusting and incompetent cash pit beloved only to the people it enriches.
My opinion on medicine isn’t any more developed than that, but fortunately Tim Noah’s thinking is fully baked :
The problem isn’t the science; it’s the boring stuff, like the size and variety of the cohort that’s insured, and the availability of computerized medical records, and the price tag for a visit to the doctor. Writ large, it’s the inability of the health care system to benefit economically from improving the long-term health of its customers. This is a job private industry can’t do.
Short of somehow altering human psychology such that we live healthier lives and demand fewer elaborate and unnecessary procedures from the “best” doctors, I don’t see another way out of it either. We are not cool-headed shoppers when it comes to our health, we are CAT scan–demanding, McNugget-popping idiots. Bring on the government!
I guess I’ll never be a good libertarian, no matter how much I want to see the Department of Homeland security torn tentacle from tentacle, or drunk driving legalized. The best I can do is like the programs I like and hate the ones I hate, like everyone else.
Yes, I did just say legalize drunk driving.
Backtalk
And you didn’t read my latest stuff about drunk driving? :)
As for health care, the mostly successful attempts over the past several decades to put government in charge of health care are how we got into this mess in the first place. California’s new system, along with Massachusetts, are just going to make matters worse for everyone involved—doctors and patients alike.
If you want to see real progress on making health care affordable and accessible, you’re going in entirely the wrong direction. Freeing it from the government bureaucracy which currently drives up its prices, implements tons of needless paperwork, and invades all of our privacy, is the only thing that will accomplish that goal.
Yes, I stole that link from your drunk driving post. I read it and thought, “me too!” and so finally got around to posting this one where I disagree with you.
I can see that government interference has increased the cost of providing care. But even if that increase were 30%, I don’t think that health care is 30% too expensive; I think it’s in another world. Insurance, private and public, distorts the market to where it’s no longer a market at all. It’s a free for all, at least for patients who are covered and able to jump through the hoops, and for doctors who can charge practically whatever they want.
I’m interested in whatever market-driven solutions you want to post to H.S. How do we bring the reasonable pricing of plastic surgery, LASIK, and other procedures that aren’t covered by insurance to things that must be covered by insurance?
(This is not something I want to debate here, tho, as I said I’m not really that up on it, and I have to pack for Thanksgiving. But the Tim Noah article is a good read if you haven’t read it yet. And keep up the good work of dismantling DHS!)
I had a writer who did excellent work on health care, who’s no longer with Homeland Stupidity. But I’ll see if I can put something together soon.
In the meantime, here’s a point to ponder:
Insurance causes people to overconsume health care, driving up the prices. Giving everyone state-provided or state-mandated health insurance seems as though it would simply magnify this problem further. And indeed, we’ve seen in Canada and the U.K. that in order to control costs, those countries have had to resort to rationing. So good health care becomes impossible to get at any price in the state health care system.
People won’t make intelligent health care decisions unless they directly see the prices they pay for a given procedure, even if they don’t have to pay them directly. The LASIK provider will tell you exactly how much it costs up-front; try that with the provider of an MRI! A good start would be bringing this information out into the open.
A woman brought a very limp duck into a veterinary surgeon. As she laid her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird’s chest.
After a moment or two, the vet shook his head sadly and said, ”I’m so sorry, your duck Cuddles has passed away.”
The distressed owner wailed, “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am sure. The duck is dead,” he replied.
“How can you be so sure,” she protested. “I mean, you haven’t done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something.”
The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room, and returned a few moments later with a black Labrador Retriever.
As the duck’s owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.
The vet patted the dog and took it out, and returned a few moments later with a cat.
The cat jumped up on the table and also sniffed delicately at the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room.
The vet looked at the woman and said, ”I’m sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably a dead duck.”
With that, the vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman.
The duck’s owner, still in shock, took the bill. “$150!”, she cried, “just to tell me my duck is dead!”
The vet shrugged. ”I’m sorry. If you’d taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but with the Lab report and the Cat scan, it’s now $150.”
(In a free market the vet would not have deceived his patient in such a way, because she could have readily refused to pay, noting that she had not expressly agreed to the diagnostic procedure or its cost. In a government-pay health care system, however, the dead-duck trick is exactly what is pulled: the patient may not know what's being done and has little financial incentive to find out or to complain.)Add a comment