Health Care for All

1. When it comes to health insurance, collectivism is the nature of the beast. There is no insurance without it. Calling an incentive a disincentive is also rather perverse. Without tax breaks for employer provided health care, millions more would do without coverage. That’s no solution. What do you have against socialism, anyway?

2. Medicare represents a vast improvement in living standards for most elderly persons. A broader public plan would likewise represent a vast improvement in living standards for most currently uninsured persons. The benefit of socialized medicine for cost control, access to care, and patient outcomes is well supported by the state of health care in Europe.

3. The chimera of “affordable individual health insurance” is not an argument.

4. The problems you have identified with private for-profit insurance are related to the perverse incentives of profit in this sector. Health insurance should be a non-profit enterprise, as should police and fire protection. People die in the current system so that others can make more money. This is a perversity that would not exist without the profit motive. Don’t try to blame socialism for the collateral damage inherent in a capitalist system. That’s just sad.

5. The bottom line is that the market is not the best answer to every problem, despite your protests to the contrary. “Socialism” in the form of pooling our resources is sometimes the best solution, and government is sometimes a very good mechanism for this. There is a reason that we have a government, and it is to do what the market cannot. Effective and affordable health care for all Americans will not happen without further government action. It is perverse for a government that has publicly funded fire and police systems designed to protect the property of all citizens to be restrained from providing the corollary services to protect the very lives of the people.

Neither pure socialism nor pure capitalism is desirable. In the case of health care, socialist solutions are the best solutions.