August 4, 2009
BUT NOT THE BIGGEST:
U.S. Psyche Bedevils Health Effort (Gerald F. Seib, 8/04/09, WSJ)
[T]he quest to fix health care has bedeviled every president since Harry Truman. Arguably, only one -- Lyndon Johnson, when he oversaw the birth of Medicare -- succeeded in making a real dent. Mr. Obama and Congress have, of course, spent much of the summer agonizing over how to alter the system, but this week lawmakers will head home for an August recess without having passed anything in either the House or Senate, largely because of public anxieties.This seems counterintuitive. People know the system is creaking, frustrating and way too expensive. They complain about it all the time. Yet they can't quite let it go.
Why? Like health care itself, the answer is complicated. But there are five big reasons....
Mr. Seib ignores the modern reality that health care is just another consumer good and the main reason the system costs a lot is because we buy a lot. The only way to reduce what it supplies then is to reduce what we demand.
In the abstract, you could do that easily enough through regulation, taxation, and/or rationing. But in order to make it politically salable you'd have to demonize health care in the same way that we do things like tobacco, alcohol, gasoline, and the like.
Ironically though, the very same folks who claim to want to reform health care are the ones who tend to mystify it and elevate it into some sort of God-given right. Rather than a good, they treat it as a Good. And they worry that some people don't enjoy as much of the Good as the rest of us. When it comes to other commodities, the Left generally opposes consumption, but, because they view this one differently, they're claiming that we don't consume enough because access to it is too difficult. Their "reforms" will, therefore, drive the amount we spend on it even higher, almost by definition.
This is what makes health care reform such a tough sell, that advocates do not speak honestly about what they want to do. So when they do speak about it they are necessarily incoherent and self-contradictory.
The coherent argument would be that while you and I get to waste 20% of our income on health care products, other Americans do not have that luxury. Simple fairness demands that they get to indulge themselves as well and we must all pay the price for it. After all, a society where I am botoxed and breast-augmented but you are not is unfair. How do you think that'd go over?