Living and breathing in the Second City
Why oppose socialized health care?
21Aug2008 Filed under: Policy Author: MikeBecause some decisions are too sacred for government bureacracy. I teach a current affairs class a UIC and one semester a student told the class about her grandfather (or uncle I can’t remember) who was told by his doctors that he would have to stop taking his pain medication because it was causing his kidneys to fail. This gentleman was suffering with rheumatoid arthritis, and so life without pain medication was a torture few of us can imagine. But continuing to take his medication would shorten his life by a number years.
Live a longer, more painful life? Or die sooner but have better days?
How do you make this decision? Only the individual suffering can really assess his quality of life and balance it with his pain. Only he can know whether the trade is worth it.
Socialized medicine doesn’t just socialize paying for health care, it socializes decisions about health care. Anyone telling you differently is selling snake oil. But how can society make such difficult decisions? What metrics? What measures? What is “quality of life” anyway?
There are of course pratical reason why socialized medicine won’t work. But to me the personal reason is the more profound.
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2 Responses to “Why oppose socialized health care?”
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brian
August 21st, 2008 at 5:37 pm
You’ve given no argument to support your claim that, “socialized medicine doesn’t just socialize paying for health care, it socializes decisions about health care.”
Why do you think that anyone who says different is selling snake oil? Why is it better to have an insurance company choose which procedures it’s willing to pay for by designating certain procedures “elective”? Why do you think that your student’s grandfather wouldn’t have the exact same choice to make if his health insurance was paid for by some sort of single payer systsem? Elderly people on medicare aren’t denied those sorts of choices. Dare I say you, my friend, are selling the snake oil of the current corpratist health care system.
Mike
August 22nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Dare you say anything you like. But I’m not selling anything and I’m certianly not shilling for our current system, with is FUBAR.
But let me walk you through the logic here. The whole problem of human existance is scarce resources. If resources weren’t scarce we could pay for as much health care as we wanted. We could live in utopia. But we don’t. The reality is that humans will always want more health care than will be available. So the problem of society then is how to divide existing resources. The market does this based on a prices system. Those willing to pay more can consume more (regardless of how much total money they have).
The reason health care is currently screwed up is that usually an employer is footing half the health care bill, some times teh whole thing. So the individual is forced to make a consumption decision. This leads to rapidly inflating prices because there is no check on the consumers willingness to consume.
Manged care is an attempt to mitigate this by placing an administrative body between the consumer and the provider of health care. This HMO board tries to make determination about whether or not procedures are truly “necessary” or merely “cosmestic” all in an effort to limit excess consumption.
Government run health care HAS to have some sort of consumption check in place or else it will bankrupt the economy. Either we will have a bureaucracy telling us what we have to do, because everyone else is paying for it, or we will have dramatic health care supply shortages because there won’t be enough money to pay for it.
Keep in mind that I’m not opposed to “UNIVERSAL” health care … only government run, single-payer health care. Precisely because it eliminates that basic consumer/provider relationship necessary for markets to work.