People Paying Their Own Way

Alan Aker, former state senator and another Rapid City Journal columnist, continues the discussion of socialized medicine in his column today. He further elaborates on what I said earlier in the week--and in previous blog posts--about how socialized medicine brings greater medical spending and lower quality:

Health care tends toward socialism because you’re most likely to need it when you’re least able to earn money to pay for it. It’s also harder to make people pay for health care they’ve already received. You can lose your house if you stop making payments, but not your transplanted kidney.

None of this means that socialism works any better in health care than in any other sector. Everywhere it’s tried, socialized health care is accompanied by either skyrocking costs, rationing, lower quality, or a combination of the three. Costs explode because of human nature: When people don’t have to pay for a thing, they waste it and demand more of it than they otherwise would.

Government inevitably responds to this by rationing, and in a sector such as health care, that’s going to require a lot of subjective, case-by-case decisions by bureaucrats. It would be nice to believe that the kind of person drawn to a job like that has the temperament of Solomon, but the reality is that they’ll be petty tyrants and mendacious weasels.

Alan also includes an endorsement for requiring people to carry health insurance:

We should require universal coverage for the same reason we mandate automobile liability coverage: If you don’t buy insurance, all the rest of us have to pay for your irresponsibility.

When people say they can’t afford health insurance, they often mean they can’t afford a policy that covers every little sniffle and scratch.

But many of them could afford a catastrophic policy. It‘s high time they paid their own way.

I am always very reluctant to endorse any plan where the government forces you to do something or spend something that doesn't affect the safety of others (i.e. seatbelt laws, etc.). I don't like it in the realm of auto insurance as Alan mentions, but that horse is already out of the barn. I don't know if I'd want to see another even bigger horse get out of the barn on this one.

Yet the way our system works, where the other taxpayers get stuck with the bill if someone can't pay, there's probably no better solution than Alan's, provided we don't have the will to seriously turn back the whole system so that someone could pay their own way, even without insurance.

If we do end up going this route, I hope they'll allow some of these Christian "co-ops" for health insurance. If I didn't have such a (relatively) cheap plan through work, I'd be in one of these Christian plans in a New York minute. It's a sharing system where everyone in the group gets together to help pay each other's bills. It's designed off the New Testament model, and helps keep costs and abuse down.