National Health Care?

(The follwing is an article that I wrote for our school newspaper)

 

Currently the nation is convulsed in political combat over whether or not we should adopt a system of national health care.  Those who favor national health care have many arguments in favor of instituting such a plan.  While, I find their arguments less than convincing, I do not question their good intentions.  Still, I present to you the following reasons why I don’t favor the idea:

1) The basic issue is freedom and responsibility.  In the system of slavery that existed in the U.S. before the Civil War, the slaves had little freedom.  The slave owners treated their slaves as children.  They provided jobs, shelter, clothing, food and even healthcare to their slaves.  The obvious trade-off was they were not free.  White men, on the other hand, were expected to find their own jobs, shelter, clothing, food, and health care.  But they were also free.  Somewhere over the last 200 years, many Americans have decided to accept the slave mentality.  In this view, the government (like the slave owner) should provide jobs, shelter, food, and now health care (as far as I know the govt. doesn’t subsidize clothes – but it’s probably coming).  As the government becomes responsible for each area, we lose more and more of our freedom.  In the area of health care, if the government takes over the whole system, they will choose our doctors, what tests we can have, what treatments they will pay for and many other aspects.  Furthermore, national health care opens virtually all areas of our lives to regulation because nearly everything we do can impact our health and thus the health care system.  For example, in England there are laws regulating the number of calories restaurants can serve in the main course.  You may think that this might be a good way to help reduce the problem of obesity.  You may be right, but the question remains do you want to be free to choose your own meals or do you prefer to be a slave to the government?  As high school students you are on the verge of adulthood.  You are breaking free from the control and choices of your parents to become free responsible citizens.  Do you really want to trade your parent’s control and decision-making for “daddy” government control and decision-making?

2) Quality of care is also an important issue.  Regardless of what you have heard, the U.S. healthcare system is the best in the world.  We are particularly good at handling difficult diseases like cancer and heart disease.  Nations that have national health care systems are not nearly as good.  The basic reason for this is because they ration care to control costs.  Sarah Palin recently came in for a lot of criticism when she said that national health care would lead to “death panels.”  You may find the term “death panel,” to be an inflammatory term, but the fact is in every national health care system in the world there are panels (or committees or task forces or whatever you want to call them) that determine who will get what treatment and who won’t.  If you have a deadly disease that requires a certain type of care and one of these committees has decided that you don’t qualify, then for you, that committee was a death panel. 

3) Health care reform is the wrong priority at this time.  We are fighting a war on terror.  We have troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan.  We have a national debt that is out of control and getting much much worse under this current administration (to which national health care will add several more trillions of dollars of debt).  The dollar is on the verge of becoming a second-rate currency.  We have an economic emergency that has resulted in the highest unemployment in 26 years.  At the same time, 80% of all Americans are satisfied with their health care.  This is not to say that the way we have organized health insurance does not need some tweaking but when President Obama won the election in November 2008, exit polling suggested that only about 7% of Americans thought health care was in need of critical reform.   Why then the rush to “reform” health care?  Well, as President Obama’s chief of staff famously said, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”  It appears to many of us that the Obama administration is using the economic crisis to implement fundamental and unnecessary social changes on a frightened electorate; in this case socialized medicine.

In 1944, Frederick Hayek published a book called The Road to Serfdom.  In this book he chronicles how nations who accept the idea that the government is responsible for taking care of their citizens (instead of merely creating a safe environment in which citizens can either flourish or not, based on their own choices) eventually enter into some type of tyranny.  America has not yet reached that point, but if we nationalize our health care system, we will be taking a big step in the direction of serfdom.

 

Noland