A Republican government takeover of health care — VOICES for REASON

For months, Republicans’ singular strategy in the health-care debate has been to attack Democrat plans as “a government takeover of health care.” There are at least three major problems with this strategy. 1) It fails to acknowledge that we already have a government takeover of health care, thanks to government policies dating back to the 1940s. 2) It fails to acknowledge the major, systemic problems caused by our current, government-controlled system, such as skyrocketing prices across the board. (For more on this, see Jeff Scialabba’s posts here, here, and here.) 3) It fails to offer a positive, truly free-market alternative.

In recent weeks, finally, the Republicans offered a positive health care proposal of their own.

Here’s a summary from the Wall Street Journal:

Republicans are preparing an alternative health-care bill to Democratic legislation, House Republican Leader John Boehner said, marking a shift in strategy as the full House is set to begin debate on the issue this week.

“What we do is we try to make the current system work better,” Mr. Boehner, of Ohio, said on CNN’s “State of the Nation.” … Mr. Boehner said the bill would take “a step-by-step approach” to expanding coverage.

It would, among other things, propose new limits on medical malpractice lawsuits and make it easier for individuals and small businesses to pool resources to purchase insurance.

Mr. Boehner said the Republican bill would also propose grants for states that use “innovative” solutions to expand coverage. He pointed to states that have created special “high-risk pools” to provide insurance to individuals with pre-existing conditions.

All of this amounts to: The current, government-controlled system is great, we just want to fix it with some new Republican controls instead of new Democrat controls.

After months of rhetoric, this is what the leadership of the supposedly free-market position comes up with?

Unfortunately, in health care and elsewhere the conservative/Republican leadership is really the followership of the left. Proposals like this one highlight that they have no genuine understanding of what free markets are or why they are good, whether in health care or anywhere else. Like liberals, they hold the statist view that government is morally and practically obliged to feed and nurture the population. In modern conservative/Republican lingo, a “free market” is one that is controlled slightly less than whatever the liberals happen to want at the moment (and usually more controlled than the one the liberals used to want). Witness that in the 1960s, the Republicans opposed Medicare — our biggest government takeoever of medicine — as inimical to a free market; today, they are fierce defenders of this entitlement program, which they proudly expanded earlier this decade to include prescription drugs.

For a brief indication of what a real defense of free markets looks like, in health care and elsewhere, I refer you to “A Call for the Separation of State and Economics”; for a comprehensive one (not to mention a thrilling read) you can’t do better than Atlas Shrugged. And for an explanation of what kind of leadership will be necessary to reverse the anti-capitalist tide, you can’t do better than For the New Intellectual.