Single payer advocates want the federal government to run healthcare because it’s important, not for any constitutional or economic reason. Yet healthcare is not in the U.S. Constitution, nor is there a free rider problem or other market failure justifying nationalization.
Further, socializing healthcare will just lead to increased bureaucracy, reduced privacy and choice, cookbook medicine, rationing and wait lists.
How about a single payer grocery system? I think not. And groceries, like carrots, are just as much a necessity as healthcare, yet we certainly don’t want a single payer food system.
Healthcare (other than immunizations that prevent spreading like fire) is not a public good any more than clothing or computers are. Just because something is good, or even a necessity, does not mean government should run it. We don’t want a single payer computer industry do we? Healthcare should be just as deregulated and privatized as clothes, computers and carrots.
We should (1) legalize interstate sales of health insurance; (2) end mandates, which require us to buy insurance with all the bells and whistles rather than a functional bare-bones policy; (3) reduce third party (employer, government, insurance company) payments to encourage portability (not losing your insurance if you lose your job) and to increase shopping and awareness of prices. These three things will put downward pressure on health costs.
Europe is often held up as a model for the US when it comes to healthcare. But in Sweden, patients wait six months for heart surgery. And countries with universal healthcare often deny procedures to elderly patients as people just become impersonal numbers in a system. And requiring—under pain of penalty—that everyone buy insurance (like Massachusetts has done), is coercive and un-American.
Mitt Romney’s “universal” health plan, started in 2006, hasn’t worked. Living proof that we need less government involvement in healthcare, not more.
Privatization is the key. Private companies make medical innovations, and our for-profit medical system attracts the best medical talent from around the world.
The private sector gives us flat screen TV’s and laptop computers, the government gives us the DMV and kidney transplant wait lists. If you want healthcare with the compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the Post Office, you want a single payer, government-dominated system.
Jeff E. Jared is a Kirkland resident and attorney.
