Thursday, December 02, 2004
Mandatory health insurance?
[Ron Bailey, "Mandatory Health Insurance Now!," Reason, November 2004.]
First Nick Gillespie questions the value of low taxes and now Ronald Bailey wants to put an end to freedom of contract in health care. What's going on at Reason?
There’s no reason to put off the campaign for a mandatory private system until we’ve worked out all the details. To keep the great American health innovation machine running, it is vital to keep medicine private and consumer-driven, and that means going on the offensive now.
Maintaining our private medical system is vital because American health care and medical science are the most advanced and innovative in the world. If a national single-payer health care system is adopted, most medical progress will be stopped in its tracks. The proposal for mandatory health insurance offers a way to maintain our private system, expand consumer choice, lower costs, and allow medical progress to continue.
With all of the progress being made in consumer driven health care already - from HSAs to calls for reform of the tax code - there is absolutely no reason to implement a halfway house to socialized medicine. Certainly, Bailey does point out some persuasive arguments for mandated coverage:
"Mandated coverage would replace Medicaid and state Children’s Health Insurance Programs because lower-income and unemployed people would receive a voucher to purchase private health insurance," says Wharton’s Mark Pauly. "This would mean full privatization for people under age 65." He holds out an even brighter prospect: "Actually, in principle, mandated coverage could replace Medicare too." The entire medical system could be privatized. The slowly expanding Medicare, Medicaid, and S-CHIP behemoths that are inexorably absorbing more and more of the U.S. health care system could be eliminated.
It is hard to see how this would not be a devil's bargain, though. In The State, economist Anthony de Jasay explains that "The state is a capitalist state if it does not demand ownership to be justified, and does not interfere for his own good with a person's contracts." This includes "the extremely important freedom not to contract at all" (emphasis original). Mandated coverage moves us away from that model, not toward it, and involves the all-too dangerous temptation of sacrificing liberty for security. The reason that we have a welfare state today is that Americans were sold a bill of goods claiming that we needed a little bit of socialism to save capitalism. We should have learned enough from the failure of those policies to not travel down that road any further.
[Ron Bailey, "Mandatory Health Insurance Now!," Reason, November 2004.]
First Nick Gillespie questions the value of low taxes and now Ronald Bailey wants to put an end to freedom of contract in health care. What's going on at Reason?
There’s no reason to put off the campaign for a mandatory private system until we’ve worked out all the details. To keep the great American health innovation machine running, it is vital to keep medicine private and consumer-driven, and that means going on the offensive now.
Maintaining our private medical system is vital because American health care and medical science are the most advanced and innovative in the world. If a national single-payer health care system is adopted, most medical progress will be stopped in its tracks. The proposal for mandatory health insurance offers a way to maintain our private system, expand consumer choice, lower costs, and allow medical progress to continue.
With all of the progress being made in consumer driven health care already - from HSAs to calls for reform of the tax code - there is absolutely no reason to implement a halfway house to socialized medicine. Certainly, Bailey does point out some persuasive arguments for mandated coverage:
"Mandated coverage would replace Medicaid and state Children’s Health Insurance Programs because lower-income and unemployed people would receive a voucher to purchase private health insurance," says Wharton’s Mark Pauly. "This would mean full privatization for people under age 65." He holds out an even brighter prospect: "Actually, in principle, mandated coverage could replace Medicare too." The entire medical system could be privatized. The slowly expanding Medicare, Medicaid, and S-CHIP behemoths that are inexorably absorbing more and more of the U.S. health care system could be eliminated.
It is hard to see how this would not be a devil's bargain, though. In The State, economist Anthony de Jasay explains that "The state is a capitalist state if it does not demand ownership to be justified, and does not interfere for his own good with a person's contracts." This includes "the extremely important freedom not to contract at all" (emphasis original). Mandated coverage moves us away from that model, not toward it, and involves the all-too dangerous temptation of sacrificing liberty for security. The reason that we have a welfare state today is that Americans were sold a bill of goods claiming that we needed a little bit of socialism to save capitalism. We should have learned enough from the failure of those policies to not travel down that road any further.
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