The National Review is considered to be the magazine that started today's conservative movement. I read it to try to get the sane(?) Right's take on issues. Yesterday Mark Steyn had a column on NR Online that identifies the real conservative argument against health care. The title says it all
A Liberty Issue
Government health care would be wrong even if it "controlled costs."
Steyn is absolutely right when he writes:
. . . health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. . . . It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists — to those who believe government has a legitimate right to regulate human affairs in every particular.
It is interesting to consider his argument, because if the opponents to health care reform would make it, the debate would be over and we would win.
Steyn notes that conservatives should not argue about costs because if costs do fall, health care reform will happen.
Rather, as a good conservative, Steyn makes the argument about individual decisions:
It’s often argued that, as a proportion of GDP, America spends more on health care than countries with government medical systems. But, as a point of fact, "America" doesn’t spend anything on health care: Hundreds of millions of people make hundreds of millions of individual decisions about what they’re going to spend on health care. Whereas up north a handful of bureaucrats determine what Canada will spend on health care — and that’s that: Health care is a government budget item.
For Steyn, and I assume for all true believers in the marketplace, we as individuals make individual decisions about health care like we do everything else. And, I'm not kidding about the everything else.
Here is Steyn's "argument" on the website of America's leading conservative magazine of opinion.
After all, it’s no surprise that millions of free people freely choosing how they spend their own money will spend it in different ways than government bureaucrats would be willing to license on their behalf. America spends more per capita on food than Zimbabwe. America spends more on vacations than North Korea. America spends more on lap-dancing than Saudi Arabia (well, officially). Canada spends more per capita on doughnuts than America — and, given comparative girths, Canucks are clearly not getting as much bang for the buck. Why doesn’t Ottawa introduce a National Doughnut Licensing Agency?
On the pages of the leading conservative magazine of opinion, access to health care is compared to buying dougnuts. (If he was really serious he would have noted that Americans spend almost no money on poutine, but Canadian, especially those in Quebec, spend a whole lot without the apparent increase in girth either.)
Steyn closes with the issue of liberty.
Government health care would be wrong even if it "controlled costs." It’s a liberty issue. I’d rather be free to choose, even if I make the wrong choices.
Free to choose like free to choose taking a vacation or eating a doughnut.
Let's ignore the fact that most of us don't think about getting a heart by-pass the way we do about whether or not we will eat a doughnut. I really don't care if there is a half price special on heart by-pass surgery next week -- if I don't need one, I don't get one.
Let's think about "free to choose." Are children "free to choose" if their parents can't afford insuring them? Should parents be "free to choose" if they will provide appropriate health care to their children? (See the case about the parents in Wisconsin relying on prayer to cure their daughter of diabetes for that answer.)
Are people who lose their health care when they lose their job "free to choose" they don't have health care anymore?
Are people with pre-existing conditions "free to choose" whether insurance companies insure them or not?
Steyn is absolutely right. More and more Americans see health care as a RIGHT, something a just country provides all its citizens. If the Right loses this fight, it will be a permanent minority for a generation.