Health care has been discussed since the creation of this nation, and the continuing debate about national health care is key to the upcoming elections. Former president Thomas Jefferson discussed in his letters his ideas about a system of communal health care. When someone gets sick, his or her family should take care of them, while those without a family should be taken care of by households that could support the extra burden until they got better.
Jefferson justified this system because he believed – and rightly so – that the doctors of his time relied more on theory and myth to administer medicine rather than practicing an empirical science. Today, our doctors have empirical science to rely on, and Jefferson’s home-based system no longer sounds viable to modern ears. In comparison, a nationalized system would not have sounded viable to Jefferson.
Proponents of national health care cite the Constitution’s directive that the government should “promote the general welfare.” They argue that welfare reasonably implies the ability to get treatment when one is sick or injured, so how can we not have national health care? What these people skip is that the phrase is found in the preamble. Everything the government is allowed to do is within the body of the Constitution, and national health care is not among the enumerated powers. A preamble is just a general statement at the head of a document. It does not have the force of law, so national health care cannot be supported on the grounds that it is in the Constitution.
Another argument for national health care is that the Census Bureau in 2006 found 47 million people in the United States do not have health insurance. This is misleading, because the demographics of that huge number are never discussed. The number is skewed because it includes millions of uninsured illegal immigrants; doesn’t account for young people, ages 18-35, who consider themselves healthy and don’t want to pay for health insurance; and doesn’t dismiss those who are only temporarily uninsured. When those groups are taken out of that 47 million, the number drops substantially.
Not only will national health care create another gigantic government bureaucracy, but it also places the bureaucrat between you and your doctor. The bureaucrat will decide who gets what treatment, when, where and with what doctor. The bureaucrat will decide how much doctors earn, how much the government will pay for prescription drugs and even what drugs are made available. This boils down to rationing, because the system will not be able to support everyone’s needs. The first groups to get pushed to the back of the line would be babies and the elderly; the bureaucrat will realize that there is a limited number of heart transplants available and that it would be better to give one to a 40-year-old who could live for 20 to 30 more years than a 65-year-old who could live for only five or 10. But what’s the point of being covered if one doesn’t get treatment?
National health care will reduce incentives for people to become doctors, and it will reduce incentives for drug companies to develop the drugs that we depend on. The government will confiscate the labor of the doctor and the drug company to reduce costs. Without profit, there is no incentive to spend years in medical school. Without profit, there is no reason to spend 10 years of research and billions of dollars just to get one drug to market through the Federal Drug Administration. For all this, doctors and drug companies still provide assistance programs that can help those who are less able to afford their services.
A system of national health care such as those in the United Kingdom and Canada is impractical. The conservative response in the U.K. has been to privatize parts of its health care system. If there are problems with the insurance industry not paying for costs it promised to cover, then that is what needs to be fixed. Personal, tax-free and health savings/investment accounts are part of the solution, and the next president needs to advocate them.
Richard Garcia is a junior English major. He can be reached at rgarcia@umd.edu.
