Over at the Hill, Rising co-host Saagar Enjeti lauded President Trump’s handling of coronavirus with an odd compliment, suggesting that Trump is moving toward single-payer healthcare.
“The Republican Trump administration is essentially beginning a single-payer experiment with their Friday promise to directly pay hospitals for coronavirus treatment for uninsured patients,” the self-described populist conservative said. On Twitter, he called Trump’s move “a major shift in the Overton window towards a landslide coalition for GOP.”
So has the GOP really started a slow walk toward socialism? Call it wishful thinking if you must, but I think not.
For starters, the coronavirus — from its strange union of a high transmission rate and fatality rate to the Chinese Communist Party’s role in its spread — is nothing short of a black swan event. It’s a once-in-a-century pandemic that even the most developed of nations couldn’t have possibly prepared for. That even the supposedly “limited government” and “responsible spending” party would throw all caution to the wind to spend trillions on it isn’t terribly surprising.
But more importantly, the Trump administration’s actions are primarily self-serving — and rightfully so!
Absent any action, over 100 million Americans were projected to contract the disease, and the death toll likely would have hit more than one million. Hospitals would have become war zones, and with so many sick, industries would have likely closed on their own. By enacting early social distancing and then statewide stay-at-home orders, it’s likely that we actually minimized the economic cost and total effective shutdown time in the long run. In addition, the administration’s relief measures likely saved Trump’s reelection odds, both by ensuring that individuals can immediately survive this crisis and by providing a lifeline to businesses whose very existence is at stake.
In short, the Trump administration did what it did because they’ll get the best return on their investment. The hospital agreement is no different.
About one in 12 Americans, or 27.5 million, is uninsured. Hospitals still accept emergency patients regardless of ability to pay, but it’s possible that in the case of overcrowding or less severe coronavirus cases that hospitals would deprioritize the uninsured, leaving highly contagious patients in search of care elsewhere. The average coronavirus patient infects at least two other people, creating a logistical nightmare absent any payment. So, of course, Trump would want to incentivize hospitals not to turn away uninsured patients.
But in no way is the logical next step of this single-payer healthcare.
The most prevalent causes of death are almost all noncommunicable diseases. You don’t contract heart disease or cancer from other people. However, you can prevent them, which is why the government does spend money on public health campaigns to prevent risk factors like obesity and smoking. After all, our economic output is stronger with more people remaining in the workforce. But once someone actually does cross a certain threshold of disease, there is limited positive return on investment for the government.
Even so, it’s not as though the state is so heartless as to view such patients as a sunk cost. We have Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP, all of which are largely responsible for our impending debt crisis. Yet we still pay for these programs willingly. But conservatives understand that even if we must concede some principles for the nation’s most vulnerable, the free market serves the masses best and sets prices better than any bureaucrat ever could.
None of this is to say that our current insurance company cartel is a truly or even mostly free market. But with the administration’s deregulation on telehealth and health care practices desperately in need of cash sustenance that Big Insurance won’t pay for, the market has never been so ripe for liberation directly by the people in the form of direct primary care models that cut out insurance companies entirely.
Enjeti is absolutely correct that Trump has nailed populist outreach during the coronavirus, a feat further highlighted by the tone-deaf politicking of Nancy Pelosi and her out-of-touch operatives. But a means of ameliorating a black swan pandemic in an election year is far from a model for the rest of the future economy.
