Thoughts on the healthcare debate

From replies to “Edgar”

“Edgar”  is a friend of a friend on Facebook. The following paragraphs comprise my replies to him concerning the Healthcare issue, which reflect my own stance.  Edgar replied, and I am including the reply to provide a full context. My purpose here is to provide a full context for the understanding of the issues surrounding the bill, specially from an Objectivist point of view. I would like to mention that my intention here is purely to illustrate, not to in any way be derogative towards Edgar- as I have not been during our conversation. Despite our disagreement on the issue I found him much more approachable and rational than a colleague with whom I discussed this many months ago and with whom I no longer interact by choice. Edgar is not his real name, nor his Facebook name.

(To my friend, who seems in favor of the bill, I said:) It is very dishonest to support bills where private property -in this case money- is forced from you to pay for something that is constitutionally *not* a right, and which will cause a serious upheaval in both quality and process (need I point out the effectiveness of public schools? Or the post office?) I do not like Limbaugh nor Beck, nor would I ever say I have the same background as they do-- but as far as the healthcare bill, I oppose it absolutely on principle.

It is unconstitutional, and the worst part of it is that everybody seems to think government intervention will solve the issue, when the initial imbalance in health care (such as the forcing of employment-based insurance over individual insurance, HMOs, forbidding insurance companies from competing across state borders, etcetera) was caused by government.

 

Edgar’s Reply:

So forcing money from citizens to pay for a war that they may or not support is not dishonest? Last I checked, the constitution put life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over bombing third world countries...which makes healthcare of a right than war.

And as long as we're on the subject of dishonesty, let's talk about spreading absurd lies left and right about death panels, forced abortion, and evil socialist conspirators to scare the American people into not supporting healthcare reform. I believe that's a little thing called terrorist tactics. Hmmm...

I'm not saying this healthcare bill is going to solve all the problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than sitting around twiddling our thumbs acting like there's not a healthcare crisis while honest, hardworking Americans are suffering and dying everyday because they can't afford to pay Kaiser Permanente $200 a month just so that when something does go wrong they can be denied coverage for whatever loophole reason Kaiser can come up with.

 

My Reply:

Edgar: You are making several fallacies and errors of equivocation here. the biggest one is assuming Ii have used and supported the same arguments you have quoted and ridiculed above-- I have not. I would prefer to speak of the issue on principle and without hyperbole. Otherwise, I'm afraid you do yourself the same disservice that the aforementioned brainless pundits do to themselves, and no benefit can come from the discussion.

PS: I have not only traveled 'outside' of the little bubble of denial. I come from without, and I have seen firsthand the results, in practice, of bills like these.

 

Edgar’s Reply:

 

I was simply pointing out your own fallacy of accusing Josh and anyone who supports healthcare reform of being dishonest, and arguing your implied statement that the health and well-being for ALL of America's citizens is not a constitutional right covered under the opening statements of said constitution.

There is nothing dishonest about supporting something you believe in, or arguing against something you don't. If you don't agree with Josh and others who support the bill, fine, but don't say that their opinion makes them dishonest.

I also did not say or even assume for that matter that you had claimed or supported those arguments. I merely brought up those examples to make the point that accusations of dishonesty might be better pointed elsewhere.

Lastly, the bubble discussion was not aimed at you but at the ignoramuses such as Limbaugh who live in their little fantasy land where everybody else in the world worships America and believe that the sun shines out of our asses.

I have also traveled abroad widely and have seen the reverse of your experience and seen the positive effects that socialized healthcare have brought to many countries - and seen the negative effects of countries that do not provide healthcare for their citizens. Yes, there are some places where it does more harm than good, but the same can be said of just about anything.

The fact of the matter is that this country is in a health care crisis. We can either sit around twiddling our thumbs acting like nothing's wrong while people are suffering and dying, or we can try to do something about it. I have yet to hear any of the protesters offer any kind of alternative to Obama's plan, which of course is not perfect but at least it's SOMETHING.

My Reply: Actually Edgar, there is no fallacy here: If you are in favor of a bill that expropriates the property of others to cover something which is not a right*, to guaranty by force the distribution thereof, you *are* essentially supporting a dishonest and unconstitutional bill. We can move on to the other points afterwards, but you must first understand the first basic point that rests on principle alone: You *cannot* be honest *and* at the same time favor a dishonest policy. Regardless of what the 'intention' is, any rational thinking person cannot allow himself the benefit of dissociating the relationship between ends and means any more than he can try to dissociate the relationship between cause and effect. Both are factors of reality that are unavoidable, to the point that you cannot even avoid the consequences of trying to avoid them.

If you understand the principle at work you won't need to point out the irrationalities of the Iraq plan (note: I am of the position that Iraq should not have been an issue at all by then, if Hussein had been deposed properly as it should have happened- with Al Quaeda and Afghanistan being the proper focus of the operation) as an attempt to undermine my argument: You would understand that both issues are covered by the same principle and both have the same answer.

The constitution grants you rights, said rights are things you can exercise for yourself under your own autonomy- . If healthcare were a right it would carry the intrinsic understanding that, therefore, you now have the right to the effort and products of other individuals. Study the constitution and constitutional law-- in no case does the constitution allow for that, because it would be an immediate violation of one of the constitutional rights: The right to property, which is tantamount to your right to Life (without property, you cannot dispose of your life or nurture it). Notice one particular wording here: The PURSUIT of happiness. It does not *guarantee* you happiness, it is yours to pursue-- and rightfully so, for no-one is obliged to make you happy.

The whole issue has been twisted by several factors. It is a convenient distortion to forget that a few generations ago health care was affordable, and even those who could not fully afford it were usually given care under privately-funded charities, initiatives or groups of individuals. If you look at the history of healthcare you might find some interesting correlations. Why is employment-based insurance now almost the only way you can get insurance? Look into government intervention and you'll find the reason. Why do you have to pay such exorbitant amounts for your insurance?"

Insurance companies, by law, are forced to include a package of procedures and conditions. If you were free to tailor your insurance to cover precisely what you wanted, you wouldn't have to pay as much-- but go through the laws that are imposed upon insurance and you'll find out that even in the most basic insurance packages, there are procedures required by law which you would hardly ever need. Yet they are there, and it is illegal to get an insurance package without them.

Second point: Government forbids insurance companies from competing across state borders. Why should a company need to be fully affordable when  Government regulations (HMOS, etc) require you to ideally have insurance to deal with hospitals (making it, thus, a forced necessity) and the same Government which prevents any company outside of state borders from competing against it? You have an artificially inflated AND reduced market at the same time: Were insurance companies allowed to compete across borders then they would have to compete on prices, the lowest attracting the largest clientele- specially if they were not required by law to cover a set package of procedures (and thus not being able to truly tailor down prices).

Add to this the inefficient fraudulent medical malpractice suits that hospitals have to cover for (since there has been no tort reform) and when you step back the only possible solution here is that the government, through its intervention, has created this panorama. And this is the same government that you are relying on to aminorate healthcare costs, somehow, through even more regulations, comittees and boards.

Are you aware of what kind of politicized environment doctors and hospitals have to navigate today? Look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJjhEr9tT0I and listen for a moment. Do you truly believe that the regulation-fanatical government that created this environment is going to be any better? Hardly. All that is gong on are the ripples of the initial meddling. Are insurance companies, doctors and hospitals ripping you off? of course. But they are doing so because they went to bed with the government. Something, indeed, has to be done, but that something is not giving government more control over a field it has already disfigured.

I forgot to add: I'm not accusing Josh of being a thief, I am advising him that the course of action taken by the bill and the methods through which it is to be implemented is not an honest one. I am very aware that a great deal of people who favored this bill did so for emotional reasons, and they feel good about it.
Nevertheless, emotion is not a tool of cognition, it is merely a reactive system. It will not tell us what is a proper, principled and moral course of action *unless* we have already consciously and rationally pondered the values and premises. Otherwise all an emotion will tell us is how we *feel* about one particular issue or another-- not whether the conclusion is right or wrong.
 

The debate on health care in this country has remained solely at the emotional level.  This is not a surprise: the gaps left by most levels of schooling include rational and critical thinking, as we value 'sensitivity' over reason. It is perfectly understandable that it disturb others that a large number of people lack health care or are in dire straits to cover it. It is natural to wish to do something about it- nevertheless the emotional reaction, the immediate gut level assumption is for everybody to have what they lack.  Because reason is divorced from this debate, the question of "At what cost?" Is not asked right away- and when it is asked, the immediate emotional response is to ascribe the cost to whomever is most unsympathetic--- anyone who is making more money than we are.

After all, we have come to think of people with more income than us as evil, greedy and somehow indebted to us-- these are all emotional judgments, no rational judgment could possibly arrive at the conclusion that someone's wealth is intrinsically gained out of stealing from people. A rational mind can distinguish between a wealthy man or woman who made a fortune through hard work and a dishonest person who made a fortune through extortion, government canoodling or similar shady deals-- in short, a rational man would consider grouping all wealthy people under the emotionally charged category of evil, simply because of the fact that they *have* wealth, as inconceivable- just as it would be reticent to ascribe racial stereotypes, preferring instead to deal with each individual as presented.

The initial reaction to 'make it available to everyone' at the 'cost of the rich' rests on the same violation of the constitutional right to Life and Property: Health care is something that is produced by professionals-- doctors train for a decade or more to become trained professionals, chemists and researchers require resources to attack new diseases and create new medicines to tackle difficult ones.
Everything involved in health care requires a cost- nothing is free, and it is right and proper for those involved to be able to make money off it. Profit fuels further research and keeps the field of medicine sustainable considering the amount of resources and work that have to go into it. Forcing the government to 'make' healthcare affordable is essentially asking government to counterfeit reality: you are essentially asking government to interfere and falsify the requirements involved, to lower the prices and essentially run at a deficit (the same way it has run most schools and the now bankrupt Post Office)-- to boot further shackled by all of the mandates it will impose on professionals.

Nothing in the constitution entitles you to force the government, through law, to give you the fruit of the effort of others. By the right of property that fruit belongs to them just as the fruit of your efforts- your money, your career, etcetera- belong to you.  It is a further flagrant dissociation of principle to justify this by saying that only a number of people- i.e. the wealthy- will have to pay for it, since you are essentially favoring government  intervention into the property of other people... to benefit you. 

Because this is an emotional reaction, it fails to contemplate this: Since your qualifier to advocate government theft against wealthy people (so that you may have their money) is that they have "too much", then shouldn't that qualifier also force you to be equally victimized by the government in favor of a lower tier, since by their standards you - who are not destitute- would have "too much?" The rational mind would not only see the violation of constitutional principle here but also the fact that the questions "by what standard of 'too much'?", "How far does that standard apply?" and "What makes that standard a right moral standard?" were never asked at all.
To put it very simply: To use the government to force others to provide a service to you, by legislative force, is a violation of the Right To Life. If your private property and your career are  not yours to handle at your discretion, then the metaphysical statement is very simple: Your life does not belong to you, but to The State. This isn't an oversimplification, this isn't an alarmist rhetoric, this is a fact- an individual cannot claim a right to his life if the means by which he is to shelter, nourish and flourish that life- his property (physical and intellectual)- are denied him.

That healthcare is a much violated system, we're in agreement. However the steps towards rectifying it are not to hand more power to the jailors, but demand their retreat. With tort reform, freedom of insurance (which includes the ability to choose as few or as many procedures as you wish covered, which will bring about the resurgence of individual insurance policies since there will actually be a market for it), freedom of competition (allow them to compete across state borders) and freedom of dealing (get rid of HMOs and similar government mandates/bureaucrats and regulations that work as an obstacle between doctor and patient) and you will have a drastically changed system.

Will there be people who won't be able to afford it? There always will be.  Instead of turning to the government, however, to take care of them--- why don't you take care of them? By the 'you' I am encompassing everyone. If we had more of our income readily available to us (as opposed to taxed) we would be able to invest in as many or as few private charities and initiatives as we wished.

Obviously you are concerned about your fellow man, and it's obvious there are many, many others who share that concern. Therefore, why not create associations, charities, initiatives, etcetera, that will help people? They won't be government-run, so that means that you can actually hold them ACCOUNTABLE.

You can't sue the government if the government doesn't want to be sued. A private institution, however, can be sued for fraud, for negligence, etcetera-- that is, it can be held accountable.  Is it REALLY preferable to have the government hold the reins? Have you ever even noticed how hard it is to fire a government-employed teacher? There are countless accounts of terrible teachers who continue in government-run schools because the process to fire them is far more expensive and time-consuming than the process of hiring a new one. Is that what you want for your healthcare too?

It all boils down to principle: The government isn't here to give you what you *feel* you should have. It is here to run the courts, maintain the law and uphold your rights-- not the rights you *feel* you should have, but the rights you *have*.

If you feel there is a lack in one sector or another, do what Americans have done for countless generations, that which gave this country- once upon a time before the age of government nannies- its moniker as the land of opportunity: Do something about it. Get like-minded individuals, move on the private sector, rally up, organize, and execute.

You don't need the government for that.

The question that should follow is this:  If you aren't willing to invest time or money in this privately, why should everybody else have to pay and be forced to contribute to something for  which you yourself can't be bothered to participate? And if you can, indeed, do it, why need the government at all- specially in an area where it is unconstitutional for it to intervene? Feelings and emotions and feeling good about something is fine, but it is the mind who must work to ensure that what is done is done rightly.

I forgot to add: there have been plenty of people offering alternatives, and very sound alternatives, to Obama's plan. The media has focused solely, however, on the Republican and Democrat debate. Unless you've done research outside of those two fields, you probably haven't heard of them. Just as the political nature of the parties has now become completely alien to the constitution, the shallow nature of journalism in the country has become alien to the diverse reality of the land.