Wednesday, July 18, 2001
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Wednesday, July 18, 2001 |
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Health care: Philosophies drive debate By DAVE HAMRICK Let's explore a little further this idea of the government as cradle-to-grave care giver. In spite of what you read in this space, I don't form opinions with a simple jerk of the knee. Rarely do I broach a subject that I haven't considered carefully from both sides. I regularly seek out columnists and listen to commentators with whom I disagree, and mentally ask them to please give me a good argument. It's not because I'm trying to be more open-minded than thou ... I just want to be right, and if I'm wrong, I want to switch. I'd rather switch than fight (and if you remember that reference, boy are you old). So I've read carefully what our latest letter writer, Dr. Gunther Ruckl, has had to say on the subject of socialized health care. He's made some good points. If you haven't seen his letter in the July 4 edition, you should go online and check it out. There were some responses in last week's paper, and I believe Dr. Ruckl may have a rebuttal in today's edition. Our leaders are considering some important decisions about the future of health care, and our lives will be deeply affected by what they decide to do, so it's definitely worth a lot of space in the paper. But underlying that argument are basic philosophies that govern what each person has to say on the subject, and the central question we must answer before deciding about socialized health care is whether we think that one of the government's responsibilities is to care for our basic needs throughout our lives. If we believe that the government's job is essentially to defend us from enemies domestic and foreign and to provide a framework of laws under which we can function as free individuals free to succeed and free to fail then we will approach the health care debate from a completely different perspective than those who believe the government is the vehicle by which we should obey the biblical admonitions to care for the poor and the sick. Personally, I'm not completely comfortable with either extreme. I do believe there's a place for the government in providing a so-called safety net. I just don't think that safety net should be made of imported silk. As stated last week, I think we have to establish a reasonable level of taxation and a reasonable size for our government, including providing some help for those who truly need it. Unfortunately, when a conservative suggests any limit on the government's ability to plunder Peter in order to pay Paul, he is accused of wanting to kill old people, destroy the environment and make sure the poor get poorer, and there are demagogues who insist on inflating these social programs way beyond reason each year so that the bureaucracies grow in tandem, and the politicians' power along with them. That's how we wound up with spiraling deficits over the last 50 years. There was simply no limit to what our leaders were willing to spend or the degree to which they were willing to tax us. It may be that the only way to get back to any sort of sanity is to scrap all of the social programs, reduce the government to about 20 percent of its current size, and start over. I hope not, but I'm not seeing any progress that gives strength to that hope. I do hope that this health care debate will end in a patients' bill of rights that doesn't put our health care in the hands of the government, which would be a big mistake in my opinion. I hope we won't have employees encouraged to sue their employers and thus drive many employers to drop their health insurance benefits. I hope the bill will end up creating a framework that encourages improvements in health care without moving more toward government as care taker. We already have government-run health care programs, and I hope this bill will make those programs better. But unless you can convince me that providing health care is the government's job, and that government-run health care would be better than what we have now, that's as far as I'm willing to go.
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