Since it seems like the United States will soon bring upon itself a medical system as bad as Israel’s, I’d like at least to register my opinion about the debate before it’s over.
This is the dumbest political debate that I’ve ever done my best to ignore.
Socialized health care by all rights should have been enacted as part of the New Deal, but Roosevelt apparently thought at the time that it would be too much for Americans to handle. There were also lots of other attempts through the years to ram it down the Americans’ throats, climaxing in the early 1990s, but the most progressives could sustain were piecemeal programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Normal middle class people are harmed by Medicare and Medicaid, since they fund those programs but don’t use them, but this doesn’t have the effect that progressives desire, which is the eradication of the middle class.
Of course, I’m grateful to have grown up in a country with at least a mixed public-private health care system. When I left university and wasn’t eligible to be covered by my parents’ employers’ plans, I bought my own health insurance like a responsible adult and it was the best health care I’ve ever consumed. For the record, I am not in good health generally, so I have quite a bit of experience dealing with both America’s system and Israel’s.
It goes without saying that America’s medical system is going to be ruined by this “reform,” as medical care is only a service like any other, whether it be education, transportation or entertainment. Any attempts to escape the law of supply and demand, to impose a monopoly and to dictate to a market what it must provide and under which terms, are doomed not only to failure in the customer service sense (actually, very few Americans will remain customers, since a dwindling minority pay more and more for the benefit of a growing majority), but to the worst effects of monopolies: over- and under-production, shoddy pricing, no innovation, billions wasted on ludicrous promotional campaigns that promote to nobody but a captive audience, and Keynesian demand management.
That’s all true, but what frightens me, as I imagine myself in 2109 looking back on 2009, is that medical care will have become quite what education already has become. Private education is immeasurably better than public education in every way. But it’s also utterly inaccessible to the people who need it most: intelligent youths of lower and middle classes who, by filling their heads with knowledge and upper class ideas, could turn themselves into upper class adults. In many, many ways, medical care is the next education. And anyone who does not rail against public education, refusing it for himself and his children, has no right to argue against the implementation of public medical care.
Like with public education, the imposition of public medical care will be irreversible because progressives have completely convinced everyone else of its inevitability. This partially explains why they didn’t fret so much when it wasn’t passed in the 1930s or in the 1990s: they knew it was coming and that it would never go away once it arrived. In theory, the United States is a democracy, and in 2010 or at some later date, they could vote in a new majority that will dismantle socialized medicine. But that scenario is an utter impossibility; if it ever got to that point, a progressive-dominated Supreme Court would only have to discover a “right to medical care” in the Constitution and all debate would end.
Many decent people have foolishly waged a quixotic struggle for a sort of education voucher system or for public charter schools. While these have been implemented in a few isolated urban areas, overwhelmingly they will never succeed because progressives need to be in total control of education so they can use it to brainwash other people’s children (*). In a century and a half, there will be a similar debate over whether to allow charter hospitals and public voucher system to send poor people to private hospitals so they can get the treatment that the normal public system is unequipped to offer. As they do now, progressives will do everything in their power to prevent these initiatives, but in the end they won’t mind making a few concessions because they’ll always be able to regain lost ground later. In a society with democratic values, what’s private is always bad and what’s public is always good.
Similarly again, progressives are going to come out the day after their “reform” passes to proclaim it a wild success. And they’re going to keep saying it’s successful in the following months, years and decades – no matter how unsuccessful it proves to be by the standards of their current system. This has of course been the case with every progressive idea that, made into government policy, caused and facilitated the breakdown of civilization we all experience daily. To a progressive, no-fault divorce is a success because it results in more divorces – of millions of men and women who’d heretofore been locked into unhappy matrimony; public education is a success because, well, everyone is educated – in the intricate details of gang violence, drug abuse, sexual assault and political correctness, if not in civics, history, literature and how to write a fucking paragraph with basic literacy, let alone my grandparents’ penmanship; welfare is an unmitigated success because it has wiped away poverty … at least of the working poor; and so on.
Yes, America is about to slide a bit further toward the abyss. But, to my American friends, don’t worry – you’ll still be able to feel sorry for us.
(*) By the way, anyone who doubts that children are brainwashed by public education can simply ask my parents if they remember a seven year old version of me coming home from second grade and telling them that the inventor of CFCs (a chemical that’s supposed to torment baby seals, or destroy the ozone layer, or cause acid rain) ought to be executed for his crime against humanity. And the fact that I remember, more than 20 years later, that CFC stands for chloroflourocarbon, and how to spell it, is testimony to how insanely effective the brainwashing is.
Tags: america · education · israel · medical care · pollution · progressives · rights government · socialism