No One Should Die

Isabel tells me that she's seeing a lot of Facebook friends copying and pasting the following:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick.

I think it's missing something...

No one should die because they receive substandard government-run health care, and no one should go broke because the government forces its citizens to pay for other people's sickness.

On further reflection: has anyone ever actually died because they couldn't afford health care?
I've never heard of a lack of affluence as being listed as an actual cause of death.
It makes me quite nervous, actually, that I might suddenly keel over dead simply because my liquid assets dip below a particular level.

The last time I checked, people die from either violence or disease -- not from financial insecurity.

Medical care might prevent disease from killing a person, but it does not logically follow that the lack of medical care therefore causes the person's death.

Likewise, I've never heard of a sickness that directly causes a person to go broke. Is there some new strain of H1N1 that disintegrates money? People go broke because they purchase treatments that they cannot afford.

It seems to me that the best solution here is to find more effective, more affordable treatments for disease. The best way to do that is to encourage researchers to compete for the discovery of those cures. The best way to encourage efficient competition is to bait them with free-market enterprise rewards.

The government should not be in the business of trying to prevent people from dying natural deaths. That is an absurdly impossible task. The government's job is also not to prevent people from going broke. The government's job is to protect our property and our rights from foreign invaders and domestic criminals.

I agree that a lack of financial success greatly cripples one's ability to compete for medical resources, and that is a source of sadness. But we can find ways to improve people's finances and reduce the cost of healthcare without giving the government more power. We can benefit from health care reforms, but the particular reforms being sold to us right now seem to come with greater hidden costs than promised benefits.

Comments

[Akh Ari]

You seem to have left out one important piece of the puzzle: that a just man, seeing his neighbor in the grip of need and having the means to help, will succour him in his distress.

But how to coordinate this? One-on-one would seem not to be practicable in most situations. Some sort of community-level coordination or cooperation would seem to be in order.

But this would take a non-negligible amount of civic engagement: you would have to have some level of personal involvement with your Parish or St. Vincent de Paul Center or local pastor or other community association, or at least with people who know them.

Aside from the fact that lots of people work long hours, when they don't, I bet they'd rather spend that time poking each other on facebook, watching tv, or playing xbox games or something. Easier to let the politicians take care of it. Isn't that what we pay them to do?

[Peter Terp]

"Isn't that what we pay them to do?"

Oh, if only we were the ones paying them...we might give them some incentive to actually do their jobs. As it is, they pretty much just take our money and pay themselves with it, no?