A Modest (and Self-Serving) Health-Care Proposal

- by William Scott Browning

My car broke down last week. Turns out it was a relatively minor fix. A new alternator has my 1996 Chevy Cavalier running just fine. The old lady has clocked 160+ thousand miles though so I doubt my woes are done. Guess what all of my enlightened friends suggested as I navigated this latest life-crisis? Cash for Clunkers! Cash for Clunkers! Right…

Turns out that Cash for Clunkers is the perfect socialist vehicle. (Pardons for the bad pun.) Never in my life have I ever been foolish or wealthy enough to buy a car trapped in the drudgery of 18 mpg or less. I do, despite subsisting below poverty level, get to pay taxes. This means I get to join the vast majority of our population subsidizing the extremes of our community (foolish and wealthy/indulgent) and pulling them towards the mediocrity of the middle. That said, you are probably wondering what this rant has to do with health care. Patience…I will get to that.

Apparently, despite my distaste for government regulation, state health care DOES indeed work. Not in Great Britain. The UK state program initiated in 1948 has suffered massive under-funding since its very first year of operation and would likely have collapsed altogether without the introduction of some market-based competition in 1989. Even so the continual rationing of medicine leaves vast portions of the population with a tax bill equivalent to paying for health insurance but no actual coverage to show for it. Imagine those 48 million uninsured Americans paying for coverage and STILL not getting it!

State health does not look so pretty in Canada either. Have you seen the taxes shoved down those poor Canucks’ throats? Despite bleeding the population to fund healthcare many treatments considered routine in the US are log-jammed with waiting lists in Canada. Has anybody ever heard of a US citizen migrating north for medical treatment? The reverse is not terribly uncommon at all.

So where and why does state health care work elsewhere?

I am looking now at Taiwan. I have never been there. (I can find it on a map though! This is not the FOX evening news.) Lots of my great friends currently reside or have lived in Taiwan. This includes our wonderfully dedicated blogmaster Ryan. The unanimous consensus is that Taiwanese healthcare is a socialist marvel and makes us poor Westerners appear backwater by comparison. Now, I personally have no idea if this is true or not. However, I have been coming to the conclusion that it very may well be a fact. If you look at the attached MSNBC article you will start to see that there are some expenses that crush healthcare in the west that are likely not factors to the same degree in Taiwan.

The number is 147 BILLION dollars. That is the estimated medical cost of obesity in the United States of America. That is the cost of over-consumption sneaking up and biting everybody in the backside. Which has me thinking on the following proposal: If our socialist administration wants to stimulate the economy, provide health care, and absolve citizens of poor decision-making why don’t we subsidize the costs of an active lifestyle. Lets borrow some money from China to finance a program that offers cash rebates for qualifying (ie overweight, smoking, and statistically unhealthy) Americans that enter health club programs, fitness classes, and martial arts programs. (I said from the beginning this was a self-serving proposal after all…) I even have the perfect catchy media buzz phrase for such an endeavor: We can call it “Funds for Fat Asses.”

Or not. Fat chance, as they say. But what if our problems with finding a healthcare model that works really are all self-inflicted? What if the problem is that government healthcare fails so miserably in Canada, England, and other western countries because health care is just flat-out more expensive in a culture that is thoroughly over-indulgent. We argue about the greed of private insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants as if that is somehow different than the greed of the average-Joe who files outrageous lawsuits against medical professionals who fail to perform miracles on the operating table. Maybe a government health insurer is a good idea. Maybe the single-provider system is a good idea. But shouldn’t we concern ourselves first and foremost with the process of addressing and lowering the cost of healthcare down to a prudent level before we borrow our childrens’ future to put a John Henry on a blank check in the here and now? What if it is NOT the cost of health care that puts coverage out of reach for so many Americans but RATHER the cost of our culture of entitlement? If that’s the case no amount of government spending is ever going to fix the problem.