I was speaking with a friend the other day about some of the economic muddles that our sorry republic is currently being pelted with, and he said something like, “But isn’t it true that our health care system is broken?”
Well, yes and no. Big chunks of it, like Medicare, are not so much broken as broke. But to the extent that such broke-ness leads to lousier and lousier care until eventually everybody gives up and demands that the lousy care be rationed so that nobody can get too much of it, it would be fair to say that our health care system is broken. That is to say, it would be fair to say that our health care system is broken to just about the same extent that our government has gotten involved in it. So, yeah, there is plenty to criticize. And this would include criticisms both on the high end and on the low end. For every pricing or availability outrage — call this Wilson’s modification of Newton — there is an equal and opposite regulation. The problems can range from an inability to get a needed MRI to those five dollar cups of jello during your hospital stay. So yeah, again, there is plenty to criticize.
But there is another sense in which people like to say that the system is broken, and it is this sense that I would like to attack with loud whoops as though I were an Cooper Indian in a Deerslayer novel. The fact that there are treatment options out there that I cannot afford is not a breakdown of the health care system in any way. How could it be? I cannot afford certain necklaces for my wife’s upcoming birthday, but I do not regard this as a breakdown in the jewelry store system. I cannot afford all the books I so desperately need, but this is not a breakdown in the Amazon system. I am the one who is broke, not them.
In a free society, there will always be high end items, and there will always be people who want them without paying for them. Sometimes those people band together, win elections, and pass ridiculous laws. The consolation is that if we successfully resist these folks and refrain from envious murmuring for just a minute, what was a high end item yesterday will become standard option tomorrow. But if carping envy seizes the high ground and starts yelling about how that rich guy’s kid got the treatment yesterday that other people did not get yesterday, the end result will be that nobody will get it tomorrow, not now, not ever.
As we seek to navigate our way through the Obama fog, we have to think like adults, and we have to stop thinking like three-year-olds who want something. Make that three-year-olds who want something really bad.
Take a lesson from Hayek’s magisterial The Road to Serfdom. The rule of law is quite different from the rule of arbitrary rules, however legal those arbitrary rules might be. Rules that can be altered at a whim, rules that can be issued today and countermanded tomorrow, rules that squeak through Congress, may all be legal, but they do not represent the rule of law. In this sense, legality is not the same thing as lawful. The rule of law is that system of governance which enables the citizens of a society to predict what the other players, preeminent among them the government, will be bound to honor the day after tomorrow. Without that key element of predictability, rational preparation for the future ceases. When bills are rushed through Congress in order to address the current emergency, the current emergency will always require the alteration of the rules. That alteration may be perfectly legal, but it destroys the rule of law. May be legal, but it is not legit.
Suppose we gave referees the authority to constantly move the goal posts throughout the game. There is no way to do this without destroying the game, and under such conditions, there would be no real way to coach under such a system. Wait, I take that back. There is a way to coach under such circumstances, and that is to have a fat roll of twenties in your windbreaker, so that you can slip one to the refs as your circumstances warrant.
In the same way, long term planning in any area, health care included, is impossible without the rule of law. If someone wants to take care of his family’s health care needs, and he wants to do it in a responsible and careful way, how can he do that if the rules for saving and investment are subject to arbitrary and capricious reversals on the part of who are like, say, Nancy Pelosi? When it becomes impossible to predict anymore, people quit trying. And when they quit trying, what is left of health care is under the control of the government, and they are fully able to ration what they found in the smoking ruins. They do the planning now, with the amount of what must be managed reduced to manageable amounts.
On an intellectual level, the problems with this approach should be glaringly obvious to anyone who made it through a decent junior high school, and so the question arises — how can this happen? Why don’t people see it? People put up with this nonsense because they have already become slaves in principle. They have become external slaves because they had previously drifted into internal slavery. A people with their hearts set free by Christ (as only Christ can liberate) will not ever have their wrists shackled. A nation that inherited freedom from such shackles from a previous and more faithful generation will find themselves dragged back into slavery, and they will be dragged there by their manifold sins.
Those sins include, but are not limited to, insolence, pride, lust, greed, sloth, envy, watching dirty movies, materialism, dressing like a skank, militarism, and voting for what is called health care reform these days.