Reason
November 2004
Mandatory Health Insurance Now!
By Ronald Bailey, Reason’s science correspondent
Unfortunately, there is no prominent political or intellectual figure on the national scene offering a comprehensive free-market alternative to socialized medicine.
Why not just tell Americans they are responsible for buying their own health insurance from now on? If people couldn’t pay for medical care, either through insurance or out of pocket, they wouldn’t get it. “After people begin to notice the growing pile of bodies by emergency room entrances,” Tom Miller (Cato Institute) wryly suggests, “they will quickly get the message and go get medical coverage.”
Since it’s unlikely that Americans will allow their improvident neighbors to expire without medical care in the streets, is there a politically palatable alternative that can preserve and expand private medicine in the United States? Yes: mandatory private health insurance.
Maintaining our private medical system is vital because American health care and medical science are the most advanced and innovative in the world. If a national single-payer health care system is adopted, most medical progress will be stopped in its tracks.
http://www.reason.com/0411/fe.rb.mandatory.shtml
Comment: For those not familiar with Reason, it is a monthly magazine of “free minds and free markets,” representing libertarian views.
This particular article is of interest because it describes the problems with our health care system from the libertarian perspective. But more importantly, rather than coming to the conclusion that health care must be left solely to the free marketplace, the author concludes that the government must mandate health insurance for everyone.
PNHP and single payer are mentioned several times in the article. The promise of affordable, comprehensive care for everyone through a public program is a frightening thought for libertarians, thus they challenge our proposal with absurd and untrue charges such as the inevitable suppression of innovation. Yet most libertarians are also very human and are repulsed by the concept of a “growing pile of bodies” that lacked affordable access to health care. And they recognize that single payer has been identified as a program that would actually work. To stave off a single payer system, they have had to provide an alternative. It is ironic that they abandon their fundamental cause of freedom by supporting a model that requires patients to include private insurance bureaucrats in their health care relationships.
The point is that all of us (moderates, conservatives, liberals, libertarians, and authoritarians) are now convinced that we must pool resources in some manner to be certain that those with needs will have affordable access to health care. All proposals involve the government to some degree. So let’s finally sit down and agree on which specific polices would be most effective in providing affordable, comprehensive coverage for all. For those who need help, we have a document that clarifies the issues:
http://www.physiciansproposal.org/proposal/Physicians%20ProposalJAMA.pdf 1. Libertarian support of mandatory health insurance (Don McCanne)
