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Healthcare "reform" is all about the raw power to decide who gets what treatment, while cramming everyone into identical little boxes in order to eliminate any efforts in the direction of individuality.
The overriding characteristic of President Obama's National Socialist healthcare is forced equality of consumption, a major step in the direction of egalitarian distribution of income. Emphasis is upon the word forced.
As we see with the widespread town hall protests against the President's proposed National Socialist healthcare proposals, people do not willingly surrender the fruits of many years' labor to the government in the name of an undefined abstraction called the common good. Particularly is this true when it is liberal-progressive bureaucrats who decide arbitrarily what constitutes the common good.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed essay, Martin Feldstein, Harvard economics professor and former chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, sums up Obamacare: it's all about the raw power to decide who gets what treatment, while cramming everyone into identical little boxes in order to eliminate any efforts in the direction of individuality. And the bureaucratic mechanism for eliminating individuality is rationing medical care.
Despite the repeated misrepresentations by the President and his spokesmen, as Professor Feldstein writes, the National Socialist healthcare bill passed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi clearly contemplates rationing.
Many supporters of Obamacare argue that healthcare already is rationed by money availability, because Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance companies will pay only certain amounts for care and will refuse to pay for some specialized treatments or prescription drugs. This ignores the obvious fact that individuals are free to make choices to pay for such care themselves and that it was individuals who selected the insurance payment programs they have.
Under Obamacare, all private insurance would eventually be compelled to offer exactly the same scope of insurance as the so-called public option. Everybody will be compelled to have the same coverage program, whether he is old, young, in poor health, or in good health.
The argument that medical care already is rationed also reflects a deep-rooted aspect of the liberal-progressive-socialist paradigm: the idea that individuals possessing more money than others is an inherently unjust social condition.
Michael Walzer's analysis of that paradigm is typical. Professsor Walzer, one of liberal-progressive-socialism's most prominent theorists, is co-editor of Dissent, a leading socialist journal.
Walzer contends that possession of money amounts to power and that such power is both unjust and unjustly used. It enables the rich to purchase every sort of social good. Why should these goods be distributed to people who have a talent for making money? This, he says, is morally implausible and unsatisfying.
Nor would it be better if we gave money to people on the basis of their intelligence, strength, or moral rectitude. There is no single talent or combination of talents that entitles a man to every available social good.
In the socialists' view, all that should count is need. If people need certain things (leaving aside how that need is determined), they should simply be given them, without regard to their ability to pay. This is what is meant, in Professor Walzer's sense, by social justice. Whenever equality in this sense does not exist, we have a kind of tyranny in which the strong, the well-born, and the wealthy get social goods in amounts that have little to do with their personal qualities or needs.
With respect to medical care, Walzer believes that it should be distributed only to those who are sick, without regard to wealth, intelligence, or righteousness. But in America today, it closely follows the income curve. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," would, however, be a fine slogan for medical care, he says. Taxes paid by all of us should pay doctors and other medical care providers. This, says Professor Walzer, necessitates a national health service of a sort to which Obamacare inevitably leads.
It isn't that every man should get what he deserves, as in the old definition of justice. The new standard is egalitarian, that is, everyone should have free and equal access to all the goods and services produced by our economy.
Liberal-progressive-socialists' goal is to restructure our political system to make a society of equals that is worth having. The starting point must be to end the tyranny of personal wealth.
A good doctor deserves society's praise, according to Professor Walzer, but that is no reason to pay him any more than any other worker. Why should a steelworker have to work much longer than a doctor for the money to have a home or an automobile? There are rewards intrinsic to the doctor's job, like the pleasure of using his specialized knowledge for the common good. That ought to be enough. There is no meritocratic defense for differences in pay.
As liberals like Professor Walzer see things, the rewards of the good life are social goods that the rich have habitually taken for themselves, without regard to any personal merit. They are merely the rewards that the upper classes throughout history have been able to seize and hold for themselves. Affirmative-action quotas are a way of redistributing these rewards by redistributing the social places that conventionally get the rewards. National Socialist healthcare is another.
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Such a system leads to something more ominous than mere socialism: Here's how.
"In the socialists' view, all that should count is need." Does this mean that a smoker in 'need' of treatment for emphysema and a practicing homosexual requiring treatment for AIDS will be treated as equals? Or does one get treatment preferences over the other because of the PC factor involved in the manner in which the condition was acquired? While there can be no doubt that both conditions are derived from extremely poor behavior choices; is one 'poor behavioral choice' more politically 'acceptable' than the other?
There are so many errors contained within universal health care that one almost doesn't know where to begin.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RIGHT AND PRIVELAGE
To put it bluntly; a right is a privilege irrevocably coupled to an attendant responsibility. You have the 'right' to drive, provided that you assume responsibility for carrying liability insurance. Get caught without it and the consequences may range from fines to revocation of the privilege. Likewise; the privilege to vote is coupled to the responsibility of good citizenship. Non-citizens, regardless of the opinion of ACORN, are not allowed to vote. The privilege of work is coupled to the attendant responsibility of demonstrating the skill set required of the position.
The only exceptions to these criteria are the God Granted rights; the ones extended to all humanity. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However; while it is the right of every human to pursue happiness, there is no guarantee one will ever attain happiness. This 'right' may not be construed as placing any responsibility on any specific human, or group of humans, to attain happiness for someone else at their expense.
Housing, marriage, living wages, health care: All of these are privileges only. Privileges to be bargained for in the open market; privileges acquired by trading work, money, or skill for the item in question. When progressives claim these as 'rights'; they deliberately skew man's compact with society by demanding a 'double' privilege.
If a person who has no money demands health care as a 'right'; he not only demands an acquired privilege (health care) for no work, he also demands access to another's work to acquire that privilege. He demands that government use force (all government is force) to extract money from others in order to ensure his 'free' access to health care. In this case; two wrongs don’t make a 'right'.
THE LOGIC OF RATIONING
While it is possible to 'promise' equality of health care; it is not possible to guarantee equal access. There must be economic equilibrium. Drive the cost for a commodity to zero and one can easily imagine the 'demand' would drive toward infinity. How much gas would you put in your car each week if it was free? Would you limit yourself to just what you needed to get by? Or is it much more likely that you would start driving to the mailbox at the end of your 50 foot driveway each day? No one washed a rented car. If there is no penalty to pay for 'overusing' a system overuse is certain.
With regard to health care; as demand increases, associated costs must increase. The federal government does not possess unlimited resources. In fact, it only possesses those resources it may confiscate from taxpayers. In order to avoid becoming a 'health care plan with an army'; we'll have to control cost somehow.
The challenges of a baby born with one or several congenital defects being kept alive with incubators, respirators, micro-surgeries, and around-the-clock attendance by medical professionals; gives that newborn every possible chance for survival. Their future potential contribution to society cannot be measured. The only immediate estimate that can be provided is 'virtually unlimited'. A 'seasoned' citizen who requires a hip replacement, insulin, chemotherapy, or some other esoteric combination of medical care to survive: Potential; not so much.
Rationing of a fixed amount of health care dollars cannot be avoided under such circumstances. It is easy to comprehend that the most effective distribution of health care dollars would be on the young. And that this calculation would have to be revisited and refined as the patient aged. It is inevitable that you reach a point where the investment no longer pays and it is time to 'take one for the team'.
THE RIGHTS OF WHOM
Universal health care is being marketed to the American People under the disguise of a personal right. This is not the case. The state has NEVER been interested in the rights of individuals. The state's ONLY interest is the continuation of the existence of the state.
Universal health care grants the state the 'unlimited' right to control EVERY aspect of the lives of its contributors. Who is born, how they live, what they eat, if they are cured, and when they die. As your ability to contribute to the continuation of the state declines, so will the relative importance of your 'continuation'. At some point logic dictates that the state decide that further investment in your existence is not in the best interest of the state. As such a system is constantly refined over subsequent generations; we eventually arrive at that point of total state control over the means and access to all things required for existance in accordance with your associated 'value' to the omniscient state. All you have to do is imagine Gattaca . Now mix in a considerable dose of Logan's Run , and eventually toss on a garnish of Soylent Green .
This is the only eventual destination such a policy will lead a civilization to.
I suggest we pay Professor Waltzer at the same pay rate as our Military, certainly his job is not as dangerous. Isn't it about fairness, His suggestion after all, why not let him be first. Wouldn't that lower the tuition rates as well?
Brewton wrote: "Why should these goods be distributed to people who have a talent for making money?" I am unsure if this was a quote or paraphrase of Waltzer, but is certainly typical of liberals with no real talent for making money and even less talent for recognizing their own cupidity in rationalizing theft.
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