Price affects both supply and demand. If a good or service that used to have a price suddenly becomes free, then the demand for it can be expected to increase.
Such is the case with health care. Granted, we will still be paying for it with our tax dollars, but that pain won’t feel the same as paying insurance premiums, co-pays and deductibles. It will all be wrapped into our tax bill, and we won’t know how much we are paying anymore than we know how much we are paying for defense spending.
A person who might not have gone to the doctor for a minor sprain or a routine respiratory infection will have no reluctance to seek medical care if it costs nothing out of pocket.
Moreover, proponents of Medicare for All claim that health care is an individual right. Beyond that, they define “having a right” to mean that the government must provide it. But are those two claims really true?
Protecting a right and providing a right are two very different things, and some progressives are trying to morph the first into the second.
John Locke, and many other philosophers of the Enlightenment, as well as the American founders who studied them and who codified their thinking into our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, would probably dissent from the idea that specific goods (food, clothing, shelter) or services (health care) are human “rights.”
They defined human rights as freedoms of action (speech, press, assembly, petition, worship) or as restrictions on governmental actions (due process, private property, jury trial, corruption of blood, ex post facto laws, etc.).
A few examples may be helpful: The 2nd Amendment gives me the right to bear arms, but it does not obligate my fellow citizens to provide me with a gun if I can’t afford one. I have the right to free speech, but I can’t demand that the government give me a megaphone, nor an assembly hall if I can’t afford to rent one, nor a church in which to worship.
There are a large number of people running for public office who continue to assure us that not only do we have an “individual right” to an ever-expanding list of material goods and services, but that is it the proper function of government to provide them for us at the involuntary expense of our fellow citizens. This is not a new idea.
The United Nations produced a list of economic, social and cultural “rights” in 1948. So has the Democratic Party platform over the years. The reality that you have to violate Peter’s rights in order to pay Paul doesn’t seem to bother adherents of that philosophy.
When I served on a Pennsylvania school board, we were required by law to have a balanced budget. We could not operate at a deficit. Because of that, we did not self-insure against the health risk. We purchased group medical insurance for our employees and let the insurer take the risk. To self-insure would have been to write a blank check on the school district and indirectly on our local taxpayers.
Medicare for All would be a bigger blank check drawn on the federal government than Medicare is now, and Medicare is already on a glide path to insufficiency.
The fatal flaw of government insurance programs is politics. Pandering politicians promise ever-bigger financial benefits while at the same time being unwilling to charge risk-appropriate premiums or taxes, and they buy us off with the promise that it can all be paid for by taxing “the rich.” The inevitable result will be much higher taxes down the road and lower payments to medical providers and hospitals.
Finally, are we willing to turn the medical profession into a 21st-century version of involuntary servitude? Will we force ‘doctors and nurses to treat us for whatever the government is willing to pay? Remember, low prices tend to not only increase demand but also to decrease supply. If doctors and nurses go on strike and hospitals close, who is going to provide us with our alleged “right” to health care? I would not care to go under the knife of a surgeon who was forced to operate on me.
Filko has taught economics, government and insurance, and can be reached at jfilko1944@gmail.com.
