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 ([email protected]) is a graduate student studying biology.
