Opinion
Flawed morality ruins health care
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Most people agree that our health care system is in trouble. It is becoming unaffordable, while patients have less control over the care they receive. Insurance is expensive, convoluted and inflexible, and doctors are more frustrated than ever. Few seem to understand why.
The reason is socialized medicine.
But funding is only part of the story. There are thousands of mandates controlling insurers and doctors. These include requirements to “insure” people with preexisting conditions, limitations on what tests and procedures are “reasonable” and on what they should cost. Just this year, we’ve seen mandates to cover autism and ignore discoveries in genetic science when writing insurance policies. Emergency rooms are required to treat people regardless of their ability to pay, and doctors are threatened with criminal penalties — including jail time — for using clerical methods outside of government edict. The extent to which health care is funded and controlled by government is truly staggering.
Why, despite the clearly disastrous results of massive government intervention, are people calling for more socialized medicine? The answer is moral.
Proponents of “universal health care” claim health care is a “right.” A moral society, they say, is one that ensures everyone’s health care needs are fulfilled. Sure, capitalism produces the best medicines and life-saving technologies, but which system is moral? A system based on ability to pay, or one that distributes services according to need? Most answer the latter.
I reject this view. Government-controlled health care does not work because it is immoral — viciously immoral.
Morality in this context means the right to one’s own life, liberty and the pursuit of one’s own happiness. These rights, Thomas Jefferson wrote, are “unalienable rights,” and government’s job is to secure these rights. It is this moral concept that our Founding Fathers sought to protect, and socialized medicine destroys.
Socialized medicine, in any form, is immoral because it places need and sacrifice above individual freedom. The Coalition for Wisconsin Health, for instance, claims it is “putting people first” by adopting such “core values” as the “right” to food, shelter and health care. Since someone must produce these values, what does it mean to declare that others, who didn’t produce them, have a right to them? It means the productive must sacrifice to the needy.
It means that those who would save for their health needs must sacrifice dollars to those who do not. It means that doctors who wish to prescribe treatments and set prices on their own terms must sacrifice their professional judgment to those who demand their services. It means those who wish to buy and sell insurance policies that exclude certain coverage must sacrifice their judgment to those who demand coverage.
The idea that one person’s need is a claim on the lives of others is a moral abomination. It treats people as sacrificial animals and destroys the basic requirement of man’s life: freedom. Far from “putting people first,” such a standard attacks human prosperity at its root.
Imagine government agencies prescribing the cost of computer components, as Medicare does for medical procedures. The ensuing destruction as manufacturers struggled to innovate within the dictates of arbitrary price controls would again result from violating the moral principle that makes computers possible: freedom.
In the same way, medical care cannot be produced under compulsion. When seeking medical care, you count on a doctor’s ability to think independently, to use his professional judgment and to take risks as your life requires. You do not wish him to forgo a procedure that he deems valuable simply because some bureaucracy rules it “unnecessary” or “too costly.”
Yet socialized medicine is a prescription for just this. Whether forcing people to pay for others’ health care or compelling doctors and insurance companies to provide certain services, it undercuts and eliminates the ability for individuals to think and act of their own accord. A doctor’s ability to provide care depends on the freedom to use his mind and act on his own judgment. This emphatically includes who to treat, what services to provide and what fees to charge.
Socialized medicine rejects sovereign, independent action and replaces it with price controls and mandates, thus destroying the very freedom that makes health care possible.
When advocates of socialized medicine claim that government will provide health care for all, they mean that doctors will be forced to provide it and you will be forced to pay. This is all government can do, as it is neither a producer nor innovator.
Health care exists because free minds produce it and productive people purchase it. But socialized medicine treats doctors and taxpayers as sacrificial servants, not individual citizens having the right to pursue their own interests and lives.
In the ensuing debate over health care, we need to keep in mind the moral system being advocated: one that protects freedom and independent thinking — the basic requirements of medicine — or one that enslaves doctors and taxpayers. The choice will have profound effects on medical care for decades to come.
Jim Allard (jeallard@wisc.edu) is a graduate student studying biology.
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Most of our health care money is spent on the last 60 days of a patient’s life. Perhaps we should just euthanize these people, so that you don’t have to shell out your precious hard-earned money to extend their hopeless life.
Helping the sick, my friend, should not be about money. Doctors know this, despite their difficulties with insurance company and government reimbursements, regulations.
Someday you might be in the position of need, Jim. On that day, you better hope that you treated others as you would have wanted them to treat you. I think the “Golden Rule” trumps the Declaration of Independence.
Jim,
You are a young guy, Im guessing. You probably have not had to deal with the healthcare system much in your life and if you have you and your family have probably had the means to take care of it. But with all due respect, your view is myopic and it is seemingly tailored only to conservative talking points with emotional appeals. I honestly cannot fathom that you would bring up morality as a reason AGAINST a single payer system. Do yourself a favor and re-write with support for your position (show us the money) but don’t give us your morality play. The majority who support your view could care less about morality. They care about the benjamins.
By the by, when Medicare/Medicaid becomes the majority healthcare payer in this nation due to our aging population, do we officially call that system socialism? Will you accept your right to SS and Medicare when you get older? Or will you reject such as socialism?
If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s “free”.
I love you
So what your saying is that the right for a doctor to choose exactly how he wants to treat a patient and set his own rates is more important than providing health care for poor, sick children?
This article was, very simply, tripe. So, since the choice of “freedom”, which you don’t even define correctly in the American context, is so important to you, I also guess you support child labor (it’s a choice that people are free to make), disagree with the minimum wage (shouldn’t people be free to work for whatever they can bargain for?), etc. etc. This is just more baseless hardline conservative junk from the same sort of people who 100 years ago tried to say ending child labor and setting a minimum wage would destroy the economy. You have absolutely no facts to back up anything.
And it isn’t just a moral think, Sherlock. It’s an economics thing. We currently have a massive amount of our economy tied up in health care, more than other developed countries. Why? Because they’ve socialized health care. Now, we wouldn’t accept the health care plans in a lot of countries. For example, we wouldn’t accept Britain’s health care plan, where people over 65 (the age might actually be a bit under that) have to pay for dialysis themselves, or they die of kidney disease. We would be more along the lines of the German or Northern European models.
The US has socialized health care? LOLcats that’s funny.
Jim,
Your editorial reveals a substantial intellect, grounded in logic and reason, and producing independent, original analyses. Your thesis is well stated, your arguements well thought out and cogent. Unlike most who submit their views here for public reflection, I did not find a single cheap shot or smarmy retort anywhere within your article.
You may be trained as a biologist but you, Sir, are a Journalist, in the finest sense of the word! You are an inspiration to all who would use these pages to inform and debate ‘the issues’.
Encore! Encore!! Encore!!!
Invictus Maneo
The single biggest reason there is a growing movement for universal health care is the misconception that we currently have a free market system. In reality it’s a horrifying mix of the free market and a government run system. You are exactly right, the way to go is more free market not less.
Although I agree with the main point, this article misapplies “freedom” to the acts of physicians. Instead, freedom of the consumer is what will be lacking in a universal health care system.
Regulations need to be removed that allow the the system to function as a free market for consumers. Right now, most people are limited to their employers plan or insurers within their state. If government gives power to the people to select their plan on their own, from insurers within any state, market forces with push prices down.
To those who dream of government run health care, there are many programs already in place for people in need. Of the 47 million without health care, 40% have household incomes more than $50k a year, 20% are not citizens of this country, and many qualify for current programs and do not enroll. Does a system in which more than 90% of people have or could easily have coverage sound broken to you? Me neither.
Also, there is no “right” to health care. A right is something that you can do without the permission of others and without impinging the freedom of others when exercising your right. However, to have a “right to health care” means that you are forcing others to help you. If money disappears in a universal health care system to pay for doctors, and people stop going to Medical School, will the government force people at gunpoint to enter health care? What about their rights? Health care is no more of a right than having transportation to get to work.
Jim, you have my support, and when the time comes I also hope that the “Golden Rule” applies and that you do receive the treatment you are giving your fellow man. I hope you have the freedom to spend the money your work and life created to get the care you have earned. As a side note, government intervention made child labor conditions worse, not better, as it will do for all things beyond defense from physical force. Maybe I will write an editorial to defend that statement, or something more pertinent to twenty-first century issues myself.
Actually pretty much every study shows that socialized medicine is in fact cheaper. Less overhead and insurance gouging, and it hurts the American economy (its estimated that 1500 dollars of every GM car is added because of having to pay for health insurance, why GM supports socialized insurance, we could actually compete better with other countries in manufacturing situations).
The “universal health care is going to lead to people not wanting to go to Med School” argument has been thrown around by the AMA and free market types for 45 years now, going back to the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid. It’s never happened. It’s not going to happen.
I see you’ve been reading Ayn Rand (which is a good thing!)
You must be a fan of Ayn Rand.
Jim Allard is right on with his analysis! Those who have a problem with it don’t understand capitalism, markets, and the great benefit they can have for the entire population if allowed to thrive. The US currently suffers from a mixed economy - half socialist/half capitalist - and is getting worse (that is more socialist) all the time. Medicine is markedly worse (much more socialist) than the rest of the system. The amount of government interference, regulation, and financial involvement in medicine is truly staggering. The ability to innovate in medicine (both in terms of types of practice, creating new devices, creating new drugs) is tremendously hampered in the current system. Despite this, even in our crippled state, the United States is the leader of the (not so) free world when it comes to technology, drugs, and delivery of health care. Imagine how great we could be without all this government interference!
And believe me, there is nothing the government needs to do but get out of the way. Free individuals, be they physicians, researchers, or other, can create great progress when not so hampered.
Furthermore, there is no natural conflict between the interests of physicians and the interests of patients - so long as each respects the choices of the others to interact on their own terms. In a non-emergent situation, a physician can set his/her fee and the patient can decide whether it is worth it - or they would rather go to another (perhaps cheaper) physician. When there is a market available, prices will set themselves (as they do in all free markets). I should no more be able to demand the services of my physician on my terms than I would demand those of my auto-mechanic, grocer, or local filling station operator.
Jim;
Your points are clearly and logically presented. There will always be people who will take the lazy ad hominem way out of reasoning through this argument. And there are always those who will use the straw man/hostage-taker position by trying to make you seem like the bad guy by saying somehow that you want to take comforting or lifesaving care from helpless children. Those arguments are dishonest. Your position says nothing about taking anything from sick children; all you have said is it should not be the government’s right to decide what gets taken from whom, in this case, the property and labor of medical doctors. You said nothing about withholding care, only that it should be the right of the person doing the giving to decide how and when his labor should be given, even when given without payment.
That is advocacy for moral freedom. Only the cynical think free people are unable to come to proper moral choices, doctors no less or more than anyone else.
you sir lack life experience and knowledge. Grow up and open your eyes. Your cult blinds you.
Anonymous at 10:56:
Do you know the writer or are you merely assuming that you do? Exactly what in the “life experience and knowledge” you presume you have and that Jim Allard does not would persuade that you are correct and he is not?
You sir lack an argument.
I loved it. I’m assuming the first group of comments is from the eternal crop of Madison’s Most Fragrant. When will people realize that every strike against freedom will move us closer to tyranny- which has never been more compassionate than freedom.
To the readers of this article. I think the main question should be this:
At what point in human history did healthcare become a “right”.
After you answer that, then review some basic micro and macro economic models to see the general effects of government intervention. If this is all lost on you, then please at least understand that government subsidy systems make people worse off than voucher and lump sum transfer programs.
Also know that Obama plans to reduce heath care costs by mandating employee health care coverage. The idea is that when everyone is insured premiums across the board decline. From a statistical standpoint, increasing the number of insured only raises the probability of more people bleeding out the insurance system. Some people are uninsured for a reason.