No. 17 Bookworm Podcast

Socialized medicine is bad and the "moderate" plan to have a public/private hybrid healthcare system only draws out the agony on the road to single payer.

In Scott Adams' Friday podcast, he noted that, while he's aware of many attacks on Bernie's and Warren's "Medicare for All" plan (aka socialized medicine in an already debt-burdened society), he hasn't heard challenges to a slightly different plan coming from others, most notably Biden and Buttigieg. This alternative Democrat healthcare plan promises "free Medicare for everyone who wants it," while allowing those who prefer private insurance to opt-out and buy their own insurance.

To Adams, this second plan sounded kind of like the free market, with insurers competing with the government for customers. If the government could squeeze a low price out of drug manufacturers, Adams posited, wouldn't that mean insurance companies could do so too? He hastened to add that he was just thinking out loud, rather than advocating for this "Medicare for All Lite."

I'm glad Adams was just advocating and not thinking. When you start thinking about it, you realize that this is a recipe for worse care than we have now, plus increasing health care inequality for the American people.

Before going further, I should begin with my two strong biases against socialized medicine, because these biases inform my belief that even a hybrid system is a bad system: My first bias is that I don't believe medical care is a right. I think it's a wonderful thing. I'm tremendously grateful I live in modern times because I didn't die from a massive cyst in my 20s or during childbirth. I'm also not consigned to a wheelchair or in perpetual pain from joint problems, nor am I rendered dysfunctional by chronic migraine syndrome, nor am I legally blind. Modern medicine has been very good to me.

Just because it's good, though, doesn't make it a right. Instead, the blessings of modern medicine are a product of the free market system. In America, the medical field has been given room to grow in extraordinary ways, both in terms of medical and scientific breakthroughs (which overlap, but aren't always the same) and in terms of ease-of-access. That's why those who say we have lousy medical care in America are talking through their hats.

On the subject of the quality of care in America, as Scott Atlas wrote in an article that should be required reading in every American high school and college, America has the best medical outcomes in the world. To conclude the opposite, you have to game the statistics in one of two ways. The first is to give a high value to factors other than a good medical outcome. This means arguing that the best medical care means seeing a doctor for free, even if it's after an interminable wait and even if you die unnecessarily, are euthanized, live in constant pain, or otherwise never get any meaningful treatment. The second is to lie about the economic cost, as Elizabeth Warren did with her faulty, shoddy study that grossly overestimated medical bankruptcies.

But back to the point about healthcare being "a right." Traditionally, in America, rights are freedoms inherent in all people and have nothing to do with government. Rights aren't given by government; they need to be protected from government.

The only way to protect an inherent right is to amend the Constitution to state explicitly that "X" is a right inherent in all people, separate from government. Progressives talking about "rights" should therefore agitate for a 28th Amendment saying, simply, "Americans have a right to healthcare."

The problem is that this amendment wouldn't achieve Progressive goals. Enshrining the "right" to medical care in the Constitution means only that state and federal governments cannot prevent Americans from seeking healthcare. The Amendment, if it existed, could not impose on the taxpayer the obligation to pay for everyone else's healthcare in a government-run system.

To read the whole thing, please go here.