For my friends and loved ones who support the healthcare plan and don’t get what all the fuss is about on “the right”

Why do I disagree with and even fear the effects of this new health plan? There are two general reasons, philosophical and economical.

First, the philosophical. All-encompassing government entitlements pervert the relationship between government and governed, and at their worst can corrupt individual dignity and lead to authoritarian tendencies in government. Am I expecting a knock on the door in the next few weeks from the IRS empowered proctologist? No. Do I think the president is sacrificing kittens and communing with the ghost of Lenin? No. Do I think that the government giving itself a managerial role in everyone’s health care will lead to innumerable, small encroachments of a softly tyrannical nature? Absolutely. The term that most accurately and succinctly captures the stance of this bill is paternalistic. In other words, it treats citizens like children; they are generally defenseless, vulnerable, and need to be taken care of, and in return for this care, the pater civitas assumes an authority over more and more of the concerns of the people. I reject this view. Forgive the boorish cliché, but not only is it truly better to teach a man to fish than to shower him with chum at regular monthly intervals, it is better for both the man and the chum thrower. Entitlements breed dependence. The broader and more all-encompassing the entitlement, the more debilitating the dependence. I find it odd that so many people look to Europe and lament that we have been behind them for so long in terms of government controlled benefits. I cannot think of a single Western European country that does not have a serious problem with economic dependence and an unshakable sense of personal entitlement among its citizenry. The obvious example right now would be Greece, in which citizens have, among other things, taken to the streets in fits of rage that their 14 month per year, government pay schedule will be trimmed to match the solar reality that there are twelve months in a year. Did government run/guaranteed health care cause this? No, not on its own. But the idea that governments exist, not to secure the conditions for a free and responsible life, but instead to provide for the every need of its citizens most assuredly did, and will do the same to us if it continues to develop along its current vector. This is especially problematic in democracies because, under the paternalistic view, the children elect the parents.

The economical. As I said, it is also better for the fish thrower if the poor man can catch his own fish, because if individuals can’t or won’t feed themselves, there is no way that ‘the government’ can do it for all of them, all of the time. The economic problems with this bill are manifold, but let me just mention a few things. First, the two biggest domestic, economic threats to our future prosperity (and much of the world, as our economic interdependence is clear at this point) are Social Security and Medicare. The unfunded commitments of these three programs top 100 trillion dollars. As Joe Biden would say, “this is a big, f***ing deal”. When countries can’t pay debts of this magnitude, they eventually collapse or are ‘collapsed’ by others. When this might happed is unimportant at the moment. My point is, why are we adding strain and cost to these programs when we can’t fund them now? Now, you might say, “There is no new, government-run plan right now, so we’re not increasing these programs, we’re just moving money form the rich to the less-rich so they can get insurance”. Here’s the problem. You can never tax the rich enough to pay for all the needs, health related or otherwise, of the non-rich. Even if you could, at some point taxation levels reach the point of bold-faced theft. How can one defend theft as a governmental policy? Moreover, the economy is a mess, and raising taxes during a faltering, sputtering economy is insane. Why the hell would employers take on new workers when they either have to cover them or pay a fine if they get any government help in order to purchase their own? This applies to companies with 50 or more employees. That includes an awful lot of companies that have a very clear incentive to not hire anyone else. So, we can expect very high unemployment as a fact of life (like much of our supposed ideal, Western Europe).

But even all of these aren’t the main problem. The bill has created a mandate that everyone must have insurance (soft tyranny? kicks in at 2014, I believe). You either get insurance at work (see high unemployment), or you buy it yourself (CBO says that individual rates will rise substantially under the plan), or you are poor/pseudo poor and get added to Medicaid which has been expanded. If you decide to ignore the mandate, you will pay a fine collected by one of the additional 16,000 IRS agents that this bill provides for. The fine is less than the cost of insurance, so it actually makes sense to opt for the fine BECAUSE insurers can no longer turn anyone away for pre-existing conditions. Therefore, more and more healthy people will opt for the fine instead of insurance, and only get insurance once they are seriously ill. Ergo, private insurance, which is supposed to be formed out of a risk pool of mostly healthy people/non-car crashed cars/non-burglarized homes, will now be composed, in the health care arena, of the long term sick, and the newly sick who cost way more, yet can’t be charged anymore to compensate for their higher cost. Company costs go up, premiums go up, more people eschew paying until they get sick, vicious circle = yet another “big f***ing deal” (I’m starting to like our vice president).

Long story less long, private insurance will be largely destroyed because it can’t maintain basic profitability, the government will demonize them even more, proclaiming that the only solution will be a bonafide government run system for all, thus increasing our unsustainable debt load which already tops 100 trillion if you add everything we’re on the hook for. The debt load will either continue to rise, or else the government will cut costs in the only ways that it can: arbitrarily cutting compensation rates, which push healthcare providers into other lines of work, and rationing of care, in which the rubber finally meets the road and the paternalistic state, which has been infantilizing the citizen for his or her entire life, now turns around and tells the suffering dependent f*** off. This heady brew is evident, once again in Western Europe, where government health care is popular with the young, who are healthy, under-employed, and don’t make enough yet to really feel the tickle of that government proctologist I mentioned earlier. As the Euros get older (especially the Brits) the dissatisfaction and horrific anecdotes of institutional neglect, and the movement toward euthanasia as standard government-funded health policy (not hyperbole, see the Netherlands, Sweden, and others) becomes more and more common.

All of these problems don’t include all sorts of specific oddities and conflicts, and more important things such as the fact that many citizens will be forced to fund, in some roundabout way, practices they find morally abhorrent. If only a portion of what I have outlined comes to pass, woe to you still alive to clean up the mess. If nothing else, I hope this will clarify why people on the right are angry and scared, and why this is not some paranoid delusion without any rational basis. For the record, I have read no defense of the health care plan as thorough as this incomplete little screed. All I have heard are blank assertions, plays on emotion, sad stories, and minor arguments that this little chunk of cost here and that one there might drop a little bit. Already things are being said that were conveniently left out during the actual debate, such as Sen Baucus coming right out and saying that a big reason for this bill is to correct the “maldistribution” of income. This is a basic tenant of socialism, that economic outcomes ought to be equalized regardless of merit (here).
That’s more thought than I’ve sustained in a long time, so I’m going to have a very strong cocktail. Be good.