We are told by advocates of a universal health insurance mandate that it would be analogous to various state laws requiring drivers to buy auto insurance. Fred Barnes explains why this is a false analogy:
[The auto insurance meme] collapses at the outset because it’s not a universal mandate. No one is forced to buy auto insurance. Only those who drive are required to. Many of them don’t bother or can’t afford insurance and drive anyway.
Barnes goes on to point out an important feature of the market for auto insurance:
Unlike health insurance, there’s a national market for auto insurance. You can buy a cheap policy from an out-of-state company. You can buy only liability and not collision. If you have a history of safe driving, you get a large discount.
So what?
This flexibility isn’t the case with health insurance. A healthy young man in Kentucky could pay $960 for a policy that would cost $5,880 in New Jersey. The Kentucky company couldn’t sell the cheaper policy in New Jersey.
In other words, the auto insurance analogy fails for two basic reasons: There is no universal auto insurance mandate, and the market for auto insurance is (mostly) free of the government-imposed distortions that encumber the health insurance market.
So, the advocates of government-run health care have produced yet another phony argument. Which, once again, begs this question: If their position has merit, why are they always compelled to support it with spurious logic?
Comments 20
You need to lighetn up - it’s just an example to help people think about universality and responsibility.
Posted 02 Oct 2007 at 11:23 am ¶Nope. It’s deliberate subterfuge meant to get people comfortable with the idea that government intrusion in their day-to-day lives is OK.
Posted 02 Oct 2007 at 2:45 pm ¶There’s no ‘government intrusion’ in organising healthcare, David. That’s what governments are for.
Posted 02 Oct 2007 at 3:09 pm ¶That’s what governments are for.
Yikes!
Posted 02 Oct 2007 at 3:28 pm ¶Marc, we all know that government intervention is an insulator from personal responsibility.
Posted 03 Oct 2007 at 11:18 am ¶“That’s what governments are for.”
You’re joking, right?
Posted 03 Oct 2007 at 3:00 pm ¶Carton, if you truly believe that is “what governments are for”, please, please, please move to Canada if you have not already! The American government is supposed to do the things directly mentioned in the Constitution and no more. I’d bet that if you went looking for mention of providing ‘free’ health care to all Americans (and illegal immigrants, of course), you’d be disappointed. Or not, because liberals tend to ignore such incontinences out of hand.
Posted 04 Oct 2007 at 6:35 am ¶Tom, you didn’t read the comments carefully. It was Brown (comment # 3) who said that. My subsequent comment was a response to him.
If you peruse my previous posts, you will see that my general attitude about government falls into the “less is more” category.
Posted 04 Oct 2007 at 8:15 am ¶If you people really think that all healthcare should have absolutely no government regulation in terms of standards, safety, training, and yes, provision for the poor then you really are in need of a visit from some large men in white coats.
Posted 04 Oct 2007 at 1:13 pm ¶If you people really think that all healthcare should have absolutely no government regulation …
No one is saying that, Marc. It’s not that government has NO role. The point is that, beyond a certain point, government intrusion is just counterproductive. I mean, look at the NHS. It’s the poster child for that very problem.
Posted 04 Oct 2007 at 1:30 pm ¶‘The American government is supposed to do the things directly mentioned in the Constitution and no more. ‘
What does this mean then?
The NHS is not a failing system despite your dishonest attempts to portray it as such. In virtually all measures it is superior to your (lack of ) system, from primary care to hospital acquired infections and medical negligence, while even measures that are supposedly better, such as cancer survival, are not because your data collection is nowhere near as rigorous.
It may surprise you to know that I actually have private insurance, through my wife’s employer, but no need to use it as there is little wait to see exactly the same specialists for free.
The most idiotic comment is that old chestnut, ‘government intervention is an insulator from personal responsibility’ - which seems to imply that there are people in the UK volunteering for unnecessary triple heart bypasses. In fact, it is the US that is the exemplar of personal irresponsibility, from the obesity epidemic to gross overtreatment for the fortunates - or often unfortunates when it goes wrong - who hold gold plated health insurance at the expense of others.
Posted 04 Oct 2007 at 3:43 pm ¶Marc, you really are a silly little man. From reading your posts here and elsewhere, you really have no concept of what the American system of government was supposed to do and have little understanding of the concept of personal responsibility.
Posted 05 Oct 2007 at 9:42 am ¶Resorting to personal remarks is a fundamental weakness in any debate. I suspect you can’t put forward a proper agument as to why a national health system diminishes personal responsibility compared with the US, so instead you throw your toys out of the pram.
Posted 05 Oct 2007 at 10:53 am ¶Marc, here we go. This is a little basic reasoning. A person is responsible for their own well being, therefore they make financial decisions to support their well being. Most protect their physical health by purchasing insurance. They are responsible for that decision, as well as the level of care they choose. When the government steps in and purchases insurance for an individual under a socialized program, the individual is no longer responsible for this decision. Thus government has insulated them from the responsibility of choosing the plan that best fits their needs. This is pretty basic stuff.
Posted 05 Oct 2007 at 1:46 pm ¶‘Thus government has insulated them from the responsibility of choosing the plan that best fits their needs.’
You imply there’s something bad about this. But there are tremendous benefits - not least no stress in wondering if you can afford it and whether a certain condition will be covered. And of course many millions in the US can’t afford it or find themselves underinsured.
Yes, personal responsibility means your own day to day wellbeing. But the right to decent health and social care is enshrined in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and that means some form of universal provision, which is why you have a partial socialised system in any case.
And under any universal system, there will be nothing to stop you buying extra insurance for yourself.
And I have news for you - people in the UK have plenty of personal responsibility for - and pride in - their healthcare system.
Posted 05 Oct 2007 at 3:39 pm ¶You imply there’s something bad about this. But there are tremendous benefits …
Marc, you clearly yearn to be a serf.
Posted 05 Oct 2007 at 8:01 pm ¶Personal responsibility as a concept is a sham, most ewasily percieved in health care. After all, the single most important determinant of health is socio-economic status at birth, not access to healthcare. A basic fundamental requirement for personal responsiblity is to exercise free will in the face of the choices you are given. There is very little we can actually control by our choices. After all, what does one do when presented with a seqence of poor options?
Access to basic health care is a public health measure, as basic as clean water, shelter, secure food, law and order, transportation, immunizations, education etc. Access to medical technology is necessary in a consumerist society which fears (unreasonably) that without the leverage to access the latest and greatest treatments, they lose choice and what they define as the greatest health system in the world. What does a mercantilist do but laud it over you, with the verve required of the largest testicles in the herd?
You’re not conservative, you’re just a bunch of selfish self-serving alpha-types.
Posted 05 Oct 2007 at 8:38 pm ¶Zagreus, your comment is a cornucopia of internal contradictions. First, you tell us that “the single most important determinant of health is socio-economic status at birth, not access to healthcare.” Then you tell us that access is “as basic as clean water, shelter, secure food, law and order, transportation, immunizations, education etc.” This is a weird (not to say ineffective) way of promoting universal coverage.
Even weirder, though, is the deterministic world view in which “Personal responsibility as a concept is a sham” and “There is very little we can actually control by our choices.” You would have been a huge hit in 16th century Geneva. The Calvinists shared your hostility for the existential worldview. And, like you, they believed there was virtue in being sheep.
Posted 05 Oct 2007 at 10:01 pm ¶If they really cared, OUTLAW MCDONALDS, & FIX THE DOCTOR PART FIRST. But it’s not about health.
Why can’t I visit a shitty doctor who only had 2 yrs of school, and pay 50 bucks out of pocket instead of using this Rommunist insurance? In fact-
Why don’t these plans reward me EACH TIME I pay out of pocket, or for that matter, pass a yearly exam with flying colors????? So I get PUNISHED for not eating at McDonalds?? FINE ILL EAT THERE THEN
Food for thought:
1. To be valid, a contract has to be entered into voluntarily.
2. The horrible plans being offered in Massachusetts have very low caps. Yet if a person has an available credit line equal to or exceeding those caps, they cannot get an exemption.
(Nor can they get a DNR tattoo or living will that says, “let me die/strip me for parts/ I do NOT want to pay.”)
This was ‘voted in’ with a bait and switch sell that promised the public that businesses who do not insure, would pay a stipend. But businesses pay 295/yr, while individuals are FINED 1500/YR as Delinquents. This subjects their houses to a Tax Taking– all this even tho they are not sick!!!
Mass Mandatory Health Ins = breathing tax. So now I will have to leave MA and desert my son all because of some clipboard-carrying busybodies (and a few vocal, greedy doctors).
I visit all doctors & dentists with credit card- am not a scumbag. Now, all my efforts went for nothing. My life- My son- My house- all I have ever done– all add up to nothing. I just hope my abandoned son, will someday understand.
Vote with rope, or vote with feet. For lever pull accomplished nothing.
40 YRS LAWFUL BEHAVIOR,ALL FOR NOTHING!!!!!!!!
Posted 17 Nov 2007 at 6:46 pm ¶I want a new car, preferably a fancy, expensive one. And a house. Yeah, a new house. And I don’t want to pay for it. That’s the gubment’s responsibility. The gubment should wipe my butt for me too. That’s nasty work, and beneath me.
Gubment, do your job!
Posted 08 Jan 2008 at 8:43 pm ¶Post a Comment