Editor:
This is a response to Daniel D’Amico’s article ‘Socialized Medicine Fails Needy Patients’ which appeared in the January 23 issue of the Maroon.
The major flaw in his arguments on the undesirability of “socialized medicine” is the assumption that a free market operates in the health care arena. Authors Steffi Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, in the Journal Health Affairs (Vol. 21, Issue 4, July/Aug 2002) already exposed this canard by noting that up to 60 percent of the funding for private insurers and HMOs comes from public taxes.
This means two things: one, the alleged private concerns are not truly private, but rather operating on the public dime (government subsidies). Hence, no true private “enterprise.” Secondly, millions of people (many lower middle class, working poor) are shelling out- via taxes- for this subsidized health care, but not receiving it.
Let’s even leave out, for the time being, that the purchase of health care is unlike that for some kind of commercial product, like an SUV, or the latest iPod. Rather, people are likely to need it most when their health is gravely compromised – exactly the time it’s most likely to be punitively expensive, or they’re likely to be denied necessary care outright.
Interestingly in the new Medicare bill, government is prohibited from bargaining with the drug companies for lowest prescription prices. Certainly this is not a “free market” but rather a coercive one. With higher and higher prices and costs to seniors assured since no true market “caps” or leverage can be applied!
Adam Smith, in his “Inquiry into the Wealth Of Nations,” says: “there are needs in a civilized society that a barbaric one refuses to address.”
He also pointedly says: “What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole.”
This may certainly be stated of health care, when provided in a way that doesn’t bankrupt a person. At the end of the day, the more healthy citizens we have, the more productive a nation we become. Thus, tax money for genuine health care ought be looked upon as a real investment in domestic economic and national security, not some kind of pernicious “robbery” from the tax commons.
Liberals and social justice activists are not looking for any free “ride” so much as an equitable playing field for all. A civic landscape wherein the common welfare and good has at least an equal chance to flourish as individual gain, or corporate profits.
Philip A. Stahl, Author, ‘The Atheist’s Handbook to Modern Materialism’
