A subsidy for demise

You don’t have to clean up your hotel room. You don’t have to drive nicely with a rental car. If you don’t have to pay to maintain it, chances are you won’t expend much energy making sure it’s in good shape. That’s someone else’s responsibility.

And if many people get their way, the same rules will apply to your body.
In with Obama’s presidency is the enduring hope within many circles that he will “fix” the American health care system by making it a universal system, or something similar.

“Pay for everybody” sounds like a great, magnanimous solution in virtually every scenario. It takes a real attention to policy to realize why, especially for America, universal health care isn’t a practical solution.

Americans don’t usually die of diseases like malaria or dysentery – afflictions that strike at random and on blameless victims. A great deal of deaths in America stem directly from unhealthy choices we make.

Fortunately for the people who live these lifestyles, we have a government which prizes the ability of the individual to choose what he or she wants. But we never said the government would pay for the damage these choices can create.  

People are more likely to make bad lifestyle choices if they know that the consequences of their actions will be subsidized by the government.

And even if America were to institute a system of universal health care and somehow care for all the smokers and junk-food eaters, it would only be able to cure the symptoms of their affliction. To treat the root cause – a lack of exercise or a pack of Camels a day – would infringe on their rights. Making someone spend an hour on the treadmill so that they can claim what the government gives out universally would be a direct contradiction of individual liberty.

Of course, there are many in America who struggle with illness but are unable to pay, whose afflictions are not their own fault.

The trick is to set up some kind of system whereby the government can help individuals but not open the door for moral hazard – to create an incentive for people to take care of themselves, but help them if they need it.

The solution, I believe, is to let them keep more of their own money, or to offer them aid in cash.

This way, they would have the options to pay for doctor’s visits, but if at the end of the year they were able to avoid repeat procedures, they would be able to spend their money as they choose.

This isn’t the end-all, be-all argument regarding universal health care; there are of course factors on both sides of the argument kept out because of space. But it would be a lean option.

It would keep costs lean by preserving competition between medical providers; it would keep people lean by giving them more reasons to live healthy lifestyles, and it would keep the government lean by avoiding more complex bureaucracy.

However, it seems many people don’t want what’s lean; instead, they want to have cake. And then they want to eat it too.