Why Universal Health Care Is Consistent with Minimal Government
I'm sensitive to arguments that government should be small; that it should protect individual freedoms rather than supporting institutions; that the best policy is often for governments to remain uninvolved unless they're protecting their constituency from outside forces (and not from ourselves). I'm especially sympathetic to this notion because of
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But negative rights are rights to be left alone. They are rights not to be subject to an action of another human being. It says nothing about disease.
Being endowed with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is not the same as saying that the government's job is to protect us from everything that may harm or attack us. The military and the police are designed to protect us from people (countries, fellow citizens) who don't want to leave us alone (how well they do that job is a subject for another discussion). I don't see how it follows that the government is then also justified in ( ... )
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I'll note that the profit margin isn't the biggest issue (see the third comment to that article in particular, and googling the topic brings up a pile of articles on the same thing); and some organizations are even nonprofits (which, granted, can still pay high salaries). I agree that the US health care system is not the best out there. There are very many ways that it could be improved. But I'm not convinced that the current universal health care bill will improve anything.
(And hey, it takes an X Prize to motivate some people to improve health care.)
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As for horror stories of Canada, for every two horrors I hear, someone else tells me that the stories are scurrilous lies. A little digging around shows that some of that second group appear to be working from studies conducted with government funding (so I skipped those - if I can't find a less compromised source, I have my answer already!), but I found this article from someone who says she's experienced both sides of the border. I'm not convinced by all of her points, and, much like the example article you posted, she doesn't actually cite any sources ... but that's journalism for you. She does address some of the necessary financial points, including pointing out the distressing bureaucracy surrounding our own system. One thing I can say for sure about a single-player system is that I'd expect its behind-the-scenes mechanisms to be more efficient. She also points out that the worst waits in the Canadian system are in rural areas. I had forgotten, until reading that, that half of Canada is more like Alaska than like the ( ... )
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Still drafting a response to the bit about the premise of the argument.
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The reason that it's meaningful to distinguish between being left alone by agents versus non-agents (and Wikipedia is far from the only source that makes that distinction), is because the government's job isn't to protect us from agents. The government's job is to protect our rights (specifically, to protect negative rights, not to necessarily provide positive rights, though there are areas where this distinction isn't so black and white). Granted, this is a matter of opinion (people who agree tend to be on the Libertarian end of the spectrum).
If you accept that the government's job is to protect us from agents, then I agree: there's no reason why non-agents should be excluded. The government is obligated to take action: to make sure that people are cared for when they're sick or injured, to inform people of the hazards of smoking and ( ... )
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This specific bill is a good 1900 pages long. Here's a brief article with a link to the full text, if you're curious enough to want to wade through any of it.
Among other things, I've read that the bill:
- will create 111 new federal bureaucracies
- raise taxes (which I hear is a bad idea during a recession); one is a "soak the rich" tax
- will require calorie counts on some menus of restaurant chains and on vending machines
- while making it illegal to classify pregnancy as a pre-existing condition, it may also make it more difficult to get an abortion if one needs/wants one (but it depends on who you ask as to whether the bill is ultimately pro-choice or pro-life) (decent discussion hereSome of the most prominent arguments I've heard against the plan do revolve around how expensive it will be (because, e.g., there is no competition and nothing to drive prices down) and the fact that it will raise taxes. If taxes are raised, less income will be generated and the government will get less revenue. Because clinics and ( ... )
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