Health Care BS

The monolithic support of progressives for an obviously ill-conceived program like Obamacare is driven primarily by their need to feel morally superior to its conservative opponents. The irony is that government-run health care is a fundamentally immoral project. Paul Hsieh does a good job of making that case in his latest op-ed for PajamasMedia:

The government should not rob men to pay their neighbors’ medical bills. Instead, it should protect each man’s right to his hard-earned wealth, including respecting his right to decide whether and how he should save it, spend it, or give to others as charity. That’s ‘the right thing to do.’

Yesterday, the President said passing Obamacare was the “right thing to do,” but he didn’t talk about the core principles of freedom and individual rights that will be destroyed if his plan becomes law. Hsieh outlines the consequences:

If we violate those principles in a vain attempt to guarantee “universal health care,” we will violate the moral principle that each man is entitled to the fruits of his labor … We will destroy the prosperity and innovation that make modern medicine possible.

And, make no mistake about it, the innovation to which Hsieh refers is the engine that drives medical progress. Even confirmed Obamacare supporter Andrew Sullivan has admitted the following about the American AIDS research that saved his life:

Without this vast and free market in medical care and pharmaceuticals, without the potential for making large amounts of money from affluent and insured patients, the innovation of treatments and regimens would never have occurred at the pace it did.

So, is it moral to turn off the engine that has saved Sullivan and millions of others just so we can hand over our money and decisions to government bureaucrats? If you doubt that this will be the effect of Obamacare, you’re kidding yourself:

We will give the government control over how doctors may practice, and which treatments patients may or may not receive. Our lives will no longer be ours, but rather the government’s. The end result will be, in Leonard Peikoff’s words, ‘the very opposite of noble.

Government-run health care is not a noble cause. Its advocates in Washington fall into two basic categories: the crooked and the naive. We can trust neither. Hsieh wraps up his piece as follows:

Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.’ Let us not ignobly enslave ourselves for an illusion of ‘guaranteed health care.’ We’ll have neither freedom nor health care — and we’ll deserve neither.

Yep.