Health Care BS

Megan McArdle is uneasy with the condescending attitude toward the hoi polloi that informs ”progressive” enthusiasm for health insurance mandates:

I’m persistently disturbed by the notion that most of our fellow citizens are intellectual children who need to be forced to do what is good for them even at massive cost to their liberty, and ours.

This was written in response to the following blather from the ever-clueless Ezra Klein:

Mandates matter because, sometimes, folks have to be protected from their worst instincts. That’s why we force everyone to pay into fire departments through taxes.

The fire department meme is, of course, a perennial favorite of single-payer advocates, and McArdle exposes its essential ignorance:

This is not true. We force everyone to pay into fire departments because fires have very bad negative externalities: if your house catches on fire, unless you live on a rural farm, there’s a good chance that your neighbor’s house will burn down too.

Klein—like most advocates of government-run health care—is too lazy to learn the fundamentals of economics, yet he and his fellow travelers want to “protect” us from ourselves.

McArdle is right to be disturbed by the paternalism that animates single-payer advocates. At bottom they are nothing more than busybodies who want to run our lives for us.

It is from them that we need to be protected.  

[HT We Stand FIRM]