A Stitch in Haste

Can’t quite fit this on Twitter:

I’m sure opponents will dust off the same old slogans they have used to try to block every major advance in health care. They will call it “socialized medicine” and a “government takeover,” just as they did when they opposed Medicare and the children’s health program — and they are just as wrong today as they were then. Such advances are no more “socialized medicine” than is the coverage available to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and every member of Congress, subsidized by the American taxpayer.

First of all, note the insolence of calling governmental mission creep in socialized medicine — oops, sorry, “not at all socialized medicine” — a “major advance in health care.” Where I come from, statins are a major advance in health care, vaccines are a major advance in health care, oral insulin is a major advance in health care, female surgeons are a major advance in health care. Bureaucratic command-and-control may be desirable (as if); it may be undesirable but inevitable; but it is certainly not “a major advance in health care.”

More importantly, what’s up with that asinine cheap shot about the health care that President Bush and Vice President Cheney receive coincident with their public office? Is Kennedy suggesting, via his irrelevant outliers, that government employees should not be covered by health insurance? Or is he just being an obnoxious jerk?

In reality, this nonsense illustrates an important point about the debate over socialized medicine — oops, sorry, “not at all socialized medicine” — namely the lie that our current system is “private” and that the supposed “failures” of our system are therefore the failures of the “private” market.

The first part of the lie, the part that is not the point of this post, is that it ignores the pesky fact that much, essentially all, of our current woes derive from government disruption of the private market, mostly through the tax code. This was the point John McCain tried, poorly, to make during the campaign: health care expenses, either direct or via insurance premiums, should either be tax deductible (or tax exempt) or they shouldn’t. If they should, then they should be tax deductible (or tax exempt) regardless of who pays for it — the employer or the employee.

The second part of the lie, the part that Kennedy inadvertently highlights, is the role of government, qua employer, as a direct participant in health care and insurance: government employees

• military and civilian
• current and retired
• employees, spouses and dependents
• federal, state and local

are all already outside the private health care sector simply by being outside the private employment sector.

Tens of millions of Americans already get their health coverage from the government — even before Medicare, Medicaid, public hospitals and other interventions, all the way down to the school nurse. But still the advocates of socialized medicine — oops, sorry, “not at all socialized medicine” — insist that the current is exclusively the failure and fault of the private sector. Somehow.

If you want to argue, as a progressive or even as a classical liberal, that the faultless incompetent in our society should enjoy taxpayer-funded health care as part of a humane social safety net, then fine. But don’t kvetch about how a government employee — even the president (or for that matter the senator-turned-president-elect) — gets health coverage courtesy of taxpayers. That is an obfuscatory non sequitur of the highest order.

Filed under: Socialized Medicine