Right now, the great liberal pretense is that the ongoing health care debate is about compassion, when in fact it is not, and if it were, the liberals would lose.
How compassionate is it, after all, to throw a new entitlement on top of unaffordable old entitlements when runaway federal spending already threatens economic trauma of a kind unseen since the Great Depression?
That’s what President Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats did, and now they are gloating with promises of new terrors to come, including cap-and-trade energy starvation and immigration reform that will amount to an open-door policy for millions of the uninvited to flock here, bringing poverty along with them.
Oh, look, you’re just worrying about money, an e-mail correspondent recently lectured me. Yeah, I replied. I am. Because money equals food on the table, clothing and shelter. It equals hospitals and medical education.
Whamming this country alongside the head with this health-care two-by-four could so weaken our economy at some point that health care will be less accessible than ever, along with a long list of other accoutrements crucial for decent living standards.
Compassion? The scholar Arthur Brooks some years back scuttled the idea that liberals were more caring than conservatives with a study showing that conservatives contribute far more to private charity.
The left’s idea of compassion is to use government as a mechanism coercing others to give, and often with the perverse result of making everyone worse off, including the intended recipients of their supposed beneficence.
A prime example was the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children welfare program that bred intergenerational dependency and discouraged marriage with profoundly disastrous consequences for large communities.
Even a popular and supposedly successful program such as Medicare can get crazily out of hand. With its unfunded liability of $38 trillion, it could wreck the federal budget all by itself unless substantially restructured in a way our cowardly congresses refuse to do.
Issues of degree enter into this. The federal government can certainly play a role in alleviating social ills if it remains wise enough to know its limits, but what happened this time out was hubris and a kind of intellectual leap off a bridge as the left told us health care was a right and the only way to assure that right was with a massively interventionist, hugely costly plan that would control everything and anything and make sure all was well in the world.
But a right, of course, is by the definition of philosophers through the ages something that government is prohibited from doing to you, not a good it is supposed to provide you. This new law does a straight-leg march through rights, most obviously in requiring people to buy health insurance whether they want to or not. In a society as well off as ours, we do have a moral obligation to help people get care. Addressing current inequities could have been done in all sorts of reasonable ways, and in fact no one is now denied care, even if we all agree that uninsured care can be inadequate.
Another e-mail correspondent – this one a retired physician – said of the new law that “significant unintended consequences are about to follow.” We’re already seeing some of them, such as state governments complaining they cannot begin to pay for new Medicaid mandates without sacrificing other vital services.
This law was brought to us by the arrogance of politicians who think they are smart enough to manage every aspect of a sixth of the economy. The truth is that they are dumb enough to try.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
