JMJ
Val,
I think the difference lies in the principle and the moral/economical consequences of disregarding basic moral/economic principles, beginning with subsidiarity.
Let's leave aside, for a moment, the cases of obesity depending on a pathology which was not caused by the behavior of a patient who is currently unable to pay without fault of his own. In a just economic system based on freedom and responsibility, a person could
choose to be overweight
and to pay accordingly. In the system mentioned in the article, even a person who could afford both his own diet
and insurance - and would be free to make responsible choices anyway - would end up being denied treatment or forced into "programs" whose effectiveness is, to say the least, disputable and which have to be paid for by the rest of citizens who could use the money for their own families and their own needs, and probably spare some to donate to charities.
In a just system, physically able people - who will not get food-stamps and subsidies unless they
really need them and will not be able to use them to buy tons of cheetos to watch basketball on HD TVs instead of going out to get a job - will have to think
carefully if they want to
freely choose to be without an insurance plan for themselves and their children. Which they will do if the system will keep forcing everybody else to be poorer in order to pay for the comfortable poverty of some politicians' constitutents. Have you seen the stats on the overwhelming corruption in these government programs? All while tons of decent people in
real need struggle daily to get by. That of course also requires an economy that has all sorts of jobs to offer to all sorts of differently skilled people to begin with. And of course the rule of law protecting individuals, doctors and companies from the government causing costs and prices to skyrocket because of its meddling with the patient-doctor relationship. That, btw, is also what causes many to renounce or cease buying health insurance earlier in their lives because of the unnecessarily higher costs. And that too has consequences later in life.
And because most people won't be able to afford the individual mandate Washington will end up imposing a single-payer system which the pollyannas of the right and the liars of the left claim is "not in the law". Been there done that. The single-payer gov't-run system will
never pay for its costs and death-panels (under different names of course) will have to work overtime to weed out valueless patients from decaying state-run hospitals, or to punish those who don't want to hear about physical re-education programs. It's what goes on in most of the single-payer countries the World Health Organization ranks as the best in the world for healthcare, where truly greedy cronies of the government create thousands of bogus semi-private healthcare clinics funded by the various departments to implement the "programs" created by the fertile minds of "experts" and big academia sociologists. You don't want to end up in the hands of those, trust me.
The need to control costs is the practical cause of the government diktats (the
ideological cause is another). And yet reliable economic calculus is
impossible in a centrally planned economy, and much less heathcare, because of the inherent nature of economics that require adherence to reality. Be as it may, once the government can tell you what to buy, how much to charge or pay for it, what a condition even
is, based not on reality but on ideological criteria concocted by Ivy Leauge theoreticians, then what cannot the government do to you? There's nothing it can't do to you.
A government that dictates what is mandatory or prohibited for you to do in order to provide healthcare services makes it impossible for Churches, doctors, communities and companies to freely engage in charitable services to help those who are
really in need. Btw they will always be a smaller number than what you have when the government decides to "help" and multiplicates destitution and misery in the process. And then the government will blame the disasters it will have caused on the "greed" or the "fundamentalism" of companies, Churches and individuals. Finally, because the failure of such systems has always been and will always be inevitable, they will have to resort to rationing and decide who gets treated and who doesn't in hopes to show a profit (and it won't work anyway).
In a free system, on the contrary, for the most part the legitimate self-interest of individuals and companies who are truly free to operate in the healthcare field
coincides with the best possible services offered at the lowest possible price, because they want to make a name for themselves and
attract more customers, not to kill them, and their profits allow donations and investments that end up benefitting those who can't afford anything. And if you don't like one company, you'll call another. Or you might even skip insurances altogether and pay the hospital directly, cash, on a case by case basis, if you can afford it. Not many can now, because the system has been crippled, in the US, since at least FDR. But it's still better that it is going to be, and above all still reformable in a more equitable and humane way with few rational legislative passages. Once Obamacare is in place, you can kiss decent healthcare goodbye. Trust me, I've spent my life in the hell they call "affordable healtcare" which nobody can afford and which kills the elderly and the poor like mosquitoes at the first winter freeze.
Without wanting to dare comment on personal situations of which I know next to zero, the main reason why you'll never get insurance unless something change is
because of Obamacare and because of 50 years of government tampering with the rights of patients, doctors and companies. Because of the absurd, unnecessary costs Obamacare imposes on individuals and companies, millions of Americans are already losing the coverage they had. And many more will lose it to the lies about the need to cover
some citizens currently without health insurance (regardless of
why they are without it. What Obamacare will give you will be the opportunity of being evaluated by a panel of bureaucrats who will decide if you aren't too old and too ill to receive a cost-effective treatment or - as Obama incredibly told Jane Sturm about her 90+ y.o.mother who needed treatment and was willing to pay for it - maybe they'll give you "a pill" and send you home because "we can't base healthcare on subjective judgements" about the value of your life(!!).
With the government out of the equation we don't have to make such inhumane choices: the minority of people who would not have coverage would be basically divided in two groups: those who chose to spend their (or someone else's) money and time otherwise and those who could resort to the excellent healthcare services provided either by the Catholic Church (the inventor of healthcare services long before government departments and subsidies were even conceived) or by professionals working for charitable institutions.
Of course there will always be some people who without fault of their own will not manage to benefit from the advantages of a free system. But we can keep their number as low as possible. It is however immoral to deny opportunities and rights to
everybody becuase
somebody might end up being cut out of the system. In the former case the misery of
many would be directly depending on immoral policies, when not
planned to increase dependency on the government, in the other case the misery of
some would be the unintended consequence of human fallibility and sin, which we canno legislate out of existence. And even then I doubt that such people would be without recourse in a truly free society. However imperfectly, historical experiences show that abject misery and destitution almost disappear when freedom reigns.
Here's a picture I think I showed before. it's the
Pellegrinaio of Siena's ancient hospital Santa maria della Scala. it's the part of the hospital where poor pilgrims who could neither pay nor work received full room and board. The administration of the hospital was a monument to Christian charity, succesful entrepeneurship and self-government. It was created by small-businessmen and the clergy of the Cathedral of Siena. No, neither Siena nor Italy had a Healthcare Department at the time and this was not the only hospital of its kind. It was so profitable that the hospital could bail out the municipality in case of need! They had money to invest in other profitable businesses and create countless jobs in the process while creating more and more charitable services. Not a single bureaucrat, "expert", agency involved in the process. Not a penny of taxpayer money wasted (not even required, actually). A free and virtous society will always take care of itself very efficiently in the fields that pertain to the free initiative of citizens.
Today, tourists pay to take snapshots of the frescoes painted 6-8 centuries ago for the spiritual well-being of patients right where they would be changed, clothed and spoon-fed daily by friars and volunteer penitents. The quality of the medical services was of course the best available at the time. Where we put museums for the pleasure of stunned, paying tourists, they'd change diapers back then. Excellence is ordinary, in a free world, because we're children of God.
Pilgrims ward
education and marriage of a daughter of the hospitalLiberty works!
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) where authorities and frankly the people are in denial about the widespread passive euthanasia of elderly patients generated by the national healtcare's inefficiency and the cultural drift towards euthanasia. What's worse is that you can now hear people not just denying it, but in fact
Fabrizio
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