Universal! Free! Unavailable!
Topic: Decline of the West
As President Obama ramps up his effort to nationalize the nation’s healthcare system, four simple words will be heard with ever-increasing frequency: “Heathcare is a right.” They’ve already been repeated so many times over the years that large numbers of Americans have come believe them. But let’s think a bit, shall we? Just what would be the political, economic and social consequences if we cast into law the deceptively simple proposition that healthcare is a fundamental right?
If it were a right, then you or I could presumably walk into any doctor’s office, clinic or hospital, anywhere on the planet, and demand healthcare. After all, whether we need an aspirin or a heart transplant, it’s our right.
But though just conceivably there may be enough aspirins to go around, there will always be more people needing heart transplants than there are hearts to transplant. To put it in the simple economic terms that advocates of universal care so viciously revile, demand will always exceed supply.
Whatever the propagandists of universal coverage may claim, healthcare is no different from any other sector of the economy. The healthcare system is an amalgam of goods and services derived from finite human and natural resources. The establishment of a universal care system based on a right to healthcare would not, in itself, increase the actual supply of healthcare by so much as a single doctor, nurse, hospital, clinic, aspirin or bedpan. Somebody will have to figure out how to obtain and allocate the necessary resources to assure an adequate supply of healthcare. Since a universal care system based on a right to healthcare scorns the supposed cruelties of the market, that someone can only be a government bureaucrat.
And this bureaucrat’s job would not be an easy one. For the establishment of a right to healthcare would certainly increase the demand for healthcare. Once it becomes “free and universal,” people will begin to consume it at a prodigious rate. And then it will gradually become clear that there aren’t really enough transplantable organs, doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics, aspirins or bedpans to go around.
As the Medicare system demonstrates, a single-payer healthcare system based on universal access is a recipe for slow-motion fiscal catastrophe. The bureaucrats and politicians who manage Medicare are trapped between the converging scissor blades of supply and demand. On the supply side, there are only so many government dollars that can be devoted to the program. But on the demand side, there’s an ever-increasing cohort of old people conditioned to think of Medicare as a no-strings-attached entitlement. The result may be summed up in a single dirty word: rationing.
In the case of Medicare this takes the form of chronic underpayment for medical treatment and services. In order to control the program’s burgeoning costs, government-mandated fees for services provided through Medicare are set artificially low. But doctors and hospitals are understandably unwilling to swallow the losses thus incurred. So they either pass the unpaid portion of Medicare costs along to other segments of the healthcare sector, or decline to treat Medicare patients at all.
The “right to healthcare” that is likely to be embodied in any universal coverage scheme dreamed up by the Obama Administration would thus be a mirage. Once coverage becomes “universal,” your right to healthcare ends on the first line of some federal bean counter’s spreadsheet. Need a new heart? I wouldn’t count on getting one unless you qualify under Rule A3 (iv) (b), as amended, in Section 7, Chapter Four, Volume LXVII of the National Healthcare Entitlement Act—or something similar. Yes, if you liked HMOs, you’ll love universal, single-payer coverage!
Posted by tmg110
at 9:27 AM EDT
