Fixing Government Healthcare With Your Money

LAST WEEK the president’s health care reform ran off into the ditch. This week, in a flurry of flashing lights, the Beltway wrecker will doubtless haul it back up on the legislative highway. The mainstream media will take a look and declare the it as good as new. But we all know that after you have run a car up on the sidewalk or into a ditch is is never quite the same again.

It is instructive to watch President Obama talk to the American people using center-right language about choice and incentives—“let me be clear about this.’” But he is talking not about choices and markets but about a comprehensive and mandatory administrative program of staggering complexity. It will not deliver choice and efficiency; it will not deliver more health care for more people with less money. It will further rigidify and constrain health care options and, where it subsidizes use of health care resources, run up the costs.

Some people have started to run the Wizard of Oz clip of “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” as though all this is mere family entertainment. But what is really going on is classic Leo Strauss.

Can this be true? Could the very Democrats that cast a thousand curses at the neoconservative followers of Leo Strauss really be faithful Straussians themselves?

Leo Strauss, you’ll remember, espoused the notion that leaders must speak with a forked tongue. They must communicate one message to the ordinary people and another message to their supporters. Leaders spout harmless pablum to the masses, but speak a coded, “esoteric” language to the those in the know.

So it is that President Obama tells Americans that they can keep their current health plan. But the insiders know that few insurance companies would stay in business if they were competing against a subsidized government “public option.”

President Obama talks about stopping unnecessary procedures. But the insiders read Peter Singer in The New York Times Magazine, and he tells them that rationing is the only way to go.

And the whole exercise is a classic demonstration of government trying to get out of a jam caused by administrative compulsion and subsidy—with, what else? more compulsion and subsidy.

You know how it works. Government starts a program of subsidy—in this case the subsidized Medicare program for seniors. Not surprisingly, seniors use far more medical services than they would if they were paying all the bills themselves. In fact they spend so much that they threaten to eat the rest of the rest of the federal budget. That is the meaning of the $30 trillion in unfunded Medicare liability.

So government comes up with a cunning plan. It proposes to lure non-Medicare Americans into a “public-option” health plan; then it subjects all Americans, including Medicare Americans, to the expert decisions of the comparative effectiveness research community. President Obama vaguely talks about creating “an independent group of doctors and medical experts” that will “eliminate waste and inefficiency” in Medicare. It will presumably use as its basis for decision the work of the Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research set up in the stimulus bill. The council is patterned after the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). NICE is not nice. It makes utilitarian calculations about the effectiveness of medical procedures and whether the government should pay for them.

Who knows? Maybe the president’s plan will work. Maybe Americans will bow meekly under the knout of government health compulsion. Maybe. But it is more likely that they will become very angry if they discover that their health care is to be curtailed, particularly after they were promised that nothing would change and no new taxes would be needed.

It is one thing to give Americans Social Security when few Americans enjoyed private pensions. It is one thing to give seniors Medicare when most seniors lacked health insurance. It is another thing to start meddling with health insurance when most Americans already have health insurance and are satisfied with their current arrangements.

And the president is betting against history. The record of all government programs is that, slowly but surely, they run down. The combination of bureaucratic rigidity, political chicanery, and special-interest rent-seeking creates a monster like public education. You get a huge establishment costing vast amounts of money. But year by year it delivers less and less. Until one day it runs off into the ditch. Even America’s favorite government program, manned spaceflight, has followed that trajectory. Forty years ago, a second Manhattan Project put a man on the Moon. Since then, nothing.

Most likely the president will get some sort of a bill out of Congress and declare victory. And then a few months later the think tanks will report that the Medicare unfunded liability is now the ObamaCare unfunded liability, and it just doubled from $30 trillion to $60 trillion.

Hey. It’s just your money.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

mysql close