Perhaps you didn’t notice, but we lost another little piece of our liberty last year. We lost the freedom to decide for ourselves whether or not to buy health insurance, and what sort of health insurance we want or need for ourselves and our families.
We must give up certain liberties in order to be governed. We accept that. The alternative is anarchy, which-given our innate selfishness and tribalism-rarely creates the sort of peace, security and prosperity we all desire.
Some liberties are taken from us inevitably, with no opportunity for redress.
From the day we are born, we are bound by gravity, unable to soar with our avian friends.
Through disease or accident, we may lose even the freedom to walk, or to live joyfully, without pain.
The freedoms taken by government are not like that. We have a choice.
Liberty is precious, and we should not trade it lightly. For every scrap of liberty taken by our government, we should ask, “Is this a bargain? Are we getting sufficiently more peace, security and prosperity to make it worth sacrificing another piece of our liberty?”
What has been the result, thus far, of our government’s intervention in our health-care system?
On the plus side, since the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, most senior citizens and millions of poor people have enjoyed taxpayer-supported health care.
On the negative side, those same interventions have caused:
Hyperinflation in health care, much greater than average inflation, for many decades.
Our health-care costs have skyrocketed from less than 5 percent to almost 20 percent of our gross domestic production.
Health care now costs businesses so much that our goods and services are increasingly unable to compete with foreign competitors, resulting in lower wages, lost jobs and economic stagnation.
Our government is now so deeply in debt (about $50,000 for every man, woman and child in America) that our nation’s credit rating has been downgraded.
Our health-care system is now so mired in counterproductive over-regulation that an increasing number of physicians (including myself) are refusing to work in it.
Consequently, we are all poorer, including the very people those interventions were intended to help.
As I see it, the net effect of Medicare, Medicaid and now Obamacare is to make health care increasingly inefficient and unaffordable. It has been a bad bargain.
We should take back our liberty regarding health care, and find a better way to ensure health care for our poor and elderly-one that doesn’t impoverish our entire nation.
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Dr. Daniel Jones of Eureka Springs is a board-certified, licensed primary-care physician who currently works as a software developer.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 01/24/2014