Health, Justice, Mercy, & The Beast

Our Benjamin Zycher [on loan from God] writes judiciously about a recent Los Angeles Times article: Cancer survivors Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson all note that the current US health system gave them a better chance of beating the Big C than the socialized medicine found in most of the developed Western world. True fact.

Also true is Dr. Zycher's identification of Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar's "news" story as an op-ed. The "reporter's" sympathies are clear. We've learned to expect that from the newspapers, but it should always be noted.

However, Alonso-Zaldivar is correct when he states:

All three have offered proposals with the stated aim of helping the 47 million people in the U.S. who have no health insurance, including those with preexisting medical conditions. But under the plans all three have put forward, cancer survivors such as themselves could not be sure of getting coverage — especially if they were not already covered by a government or job-related plan and had to seek insurance as individuals.
“Unless it’s in a state that has very strong consumer protections, they would likely be denied coverage,” said economist Paul Fronstin of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, who has reviewed the candidates’ proposals. “People with preexisting conditions would not be able to get coverage or would not be able to afford it.”

Dr. Zycher responds:

Perhaps [uninsurable cancer victims and survivors] are worthy of compassion and even subsidies; but that is not a very powerful argument for socialism in health insurance.

Quite so, but the GOP ignores the unfortunate reality of such folks at its own peril, and leaves the door open to the progressivists.

Better a bad system where all suffer equally than leaving the unfortunates to die. Them's the rules of the lifeboat, and they are fair.

Conservatives have got to be creative and yes, compassionate, or they---we---do not deserve to govern. It's conservatism's position, and the correct one, that ordering a society under lifeboat rules guarantees only eternal misery and privation. The genius of the free market is that it creates plenty for all. The moral question becomes not if the rich have too much, but whether the poor have enough.

Now, the collectivists have seized on health insurance as the barometer of our society's well-being, and use some people's lack of it to propose a state takeover of health. But the question is one of health care.

My UK friends are surprised to learn, contrary to their news reports, that we Americans don't exactly let the indigent die in the streets. Our safety net of last resort is the county health care system. Dare I suggest the words that make the liberal heart go atwitter, and the conservative heart turn black---that we make sure the county systems are "fully funded?"

For if the right doesn't get health care to all Americans somehow some way, the left will give them health insurance, creating the great statist beast whose hunger can never be satisfied, and whose mercilessness in the name of the public good [as Dr. Zycher documents here] is not a whit more compassionate.

Or moral. As Ben notes, first, they came for the fat people. Soon, some cancers will be less moral than others. Next, each man and woman's body will stand in judgment of the state. Such a brave new world that "progress" offers us. Conservatism is all that stands in its way, and so far, it's doing a lousy job of it.
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