As I have been writing about health care, the point undergirding everything I have been saying against “affordable health care for all” is this: violence in order to achieve such laudable ends is still objectionable.
One commenter asked what the point of health care was. Was it to provide health care to those who need it, or was it to profit the providers? Absent coercion, the answer is both. The point is to make a profit by providing health care. Absent coercion, if you try to make a profit by not providing health care, then the time will quickly come when a competitor finds and exploits that rather egregious flaw in your business plan. But if you have introduced the state into the equation (with the best of motives, of course), what you have done is create the possibility of entities that don’t provide the service offered, but which can remain in business anyhow, because they now rely on tax-payer monies extracted under the threat of force.
The objection was made that private health care providers and insurers can cherry pick their customers to screen out high risks and preexisting conditions. Sure, and what’s the solution? The solution is to let them.
Let’s say that someone named Smith is upset by this, and this person wants to step in with guns and make the evil corporations lose money on these folks. I have a better idea. Let’s step in with guns and make Smith go into the health care business, and let’s make him lose the money. Once we have agreed to coercion, why would we limit ourselves to the preexisting condition of already being a health care company? Why can’t we coerce the economic illiterates, and make them run companies that are now bound to fail?
Is this hardhearted? What about those who fall through the cracks of the profit-driven system? Every Christian heart does go out to those who are uncared for, to those who are uninsurable. We are supposed to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and treat the sick. Of course we are. So take up an offering already. Support your church’s missionaries. Give to the inner city work that your denomination sponsors. Jesus said to give in His name. He never told us to go out there and take in His name.
The Church is called to be an organization of worshippers, worship that results in a glorious overflow of givers. The statists, leftists, do-gooders, and sob-sisters are an organization of confused takers. They talk as though they are giving, but the whole thing is a sham. They give only what they have previously seized by force. And to crown this glorious hypocrisy, they preen themselves on their ethical conscience and moral superiority. But there are few spectacles worse than thugs with guns acting all Sermon-on-the-Mounty.