GHEORGHIU | Healthcare is Not a Right

In a free country, healthcare would never be considered a right on the level of life, liberty, and property.

There’s a reason the Founding Fathers limited their declaration of universal human rights to those three and did not include privileges like affordable housing or healthcare. They knew by an examination of history, society, and human nature that the role of government must be restricted to protection of an individual’s rights, and only by extension of this can the collective be assured of their freedom. By considering the “greater good” over the needs of the individual, government becomes the oppressive force it was meant to defend against. The constituents become victims of the government’s manipulation rather than beneficiaries of its protection, and the most alarming element of this paradigm is that they do so willingly and sacrifice their own rights and those of their neighbors in the process.

Let’s take universal healthcare as an example; the logistics of such an endeavor are implausible on their own, but the consequences of a such an implementation are infinitely more dire to the prospects of a free country.

First, one must distinguish between health and healthcare. The former is a state of being, whereas the latter is a service provided by practitioners to consumers. Like any enterprise, healthcare must be regarded by its monetary nature. First, consider the costs of providing healthcare, which include the salaries of medical doctors, nurses, technicians, administrators, and maintenance employees in a hospital or medical office. Added onto this are fixed costs like utilities, taxes, and insurance, and the cost of procedures and equipment like the machines that perform MRIs. The costs of record-keeping and other bureaucratic processes demanded by the government and practiced in order to protect against malpractice suits all factor into the equation as well.

These enormous costs must be offset by revenue from patients seeking care, charities acting on behalf of the impoverished, and insurance companies, and what remains is the profit that serves as the incentive driving many of our society’s most capable individuals to enter medicine or medical research in the first place, without whom the quality of care would drastically decline.

If the healthcare industry were to be entirely controlled by government, you can expect the costs to further skyrocket without any of the innovations or improvements in efficiency that would lead to higher revenues.

Handing the government control over market dynamics previously regulated by the price mechanism and free enterprise results in overwhelming inefficiency, rising costs, and diminishing returns. The fundamental reason for this unfortunate outcome is government’s inherent lack of profit motive, which pushes individuals and corporations to strive for cost reduction and product/service innovation. Look no further than to the horrid condition of the VA hospital system as the future of government-run healthcare.

This sounds bad enough without even considering where the money would have to come from. Which sections of the government’s habitual spending should be redirected to provide for healthcare? How much further into debt should the country plunge? A simple increase in taxes is not the easy solution so many people think it could be. Such arguments are made without knowledge of the effects increased taxes have on incentives, disposable income, and business hiring and investment decisions, all of which will be discussed in a future article based solely on taxation.

If the government decided to absorb the healthcare industry against all economic and historical wisdom on the basis of providing people with what they believe to be a special right, boundaries between free people and their elected government are being crossed that can never be redrawn until the creation of a new government. Giving politicians and bureaucrats absolute free reign and kingly power to control the healthcare industry opens the door to reaching into other industries that government officials have no business interfering with. Talk of providing affordable housing necessitates further regulation of the construction industry; under the guise of providing food to all, farms will be collectivized to disastrous results; providing everyone public works jobs leads to outrageous amounts of wasteful activities.

Under this system, instead of having an economy running on systems of supply and demand and, more fundamentally, risk and reward, the country functions on the declarations of politicians. There would be no incentive to innovate, entrepreneurship and progress grind to a halt, production plummets, and the country falls into disarray. Such an eventuality did not seem predictable and inevitable to those impacted in the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, Maoist China, and Venezuela, when the prospect of being taken care of by government trumped consideration of any alternative. Before the populace realizes what hit them, careers are being assigned by lottery in an effort to stop the hemorrhaging of talented individuals unwilling to work and provide quality without the prospect of being rewarded with anything beyond their basic need, which they would receive anyway thanks to the government’s promise. Poverty is institutionalized and only a rare few will work for the sake of work, as if it was its own reward as Karl Marx so ignorantly hypothesized. The only beneficiaries are the politicians whose lies manipulated the electorate into putting them in office and whose lies will continue to keep them there. After all, if their policies were truly in the best interests of their constituents, politicians would subject themselves to the same programs they impose upon the citizenry.

Sadly, there are those who ask, “Why not create a system where people work and the fruits of their labors are distributed by the government based on what people actually need rather than a capitalist system based on profit?” To them I plead, please pick up a book, any book, on psychology, economics, or history. Learn about the world you live in and its inhabitants before you surrender the freedoms that made America a haven for enterprise since its inception. Declaring industries to be rights, such as healthcare, is the first step down the road to slavery.