There is a congressional race going on in Indiana's fifth district that provides a dismaying microcosm of the state of policy discourse in 2020 post-America.
The campaign of the Democratic candidate, Christina Hale, is running an ad saying that her opponent, current state senator Victoria Spartz, doesn't think that matters such as education and health care should be concerns of the federal government.
The Hale team expects you to be aghast about this. You're not supposed to give it enough consideration to ask, "What is her position, then? Quite obviously, she's not stupid. She would not bother to run for such an office is all she had to say about this issue is that it's not the concern of the federal government. What is her vision of how health would get cared for?"
It is a thoroughly thought-out vision, and yes, it is predicated on getting the federal government out of the health care business:
“It is important to understand what states can and cannot do, what the federal government should and should not be doing, how to incentivize states correctly and how to give states some flexibility in what they need to be concentrating on,” Spartz said. “Healthcare reform is number one. Indiana has some of the highest prices in the country. If we don’t deal with that, we will eventually have socialistic healthcare and a socialistic country.”
According to Spartz, we have been doing too much politics and our country is in crisis with a ballooning debt, 70 percent of which she says is healthcare.
“As someone who grew up is a socialistic and government-controlled system I can say that government should be limited to only do core functions: Protect life, liberty and property, and then to stay the hell out of the way,” Spartz said. “Socialism is terrible. It not sustainable and it runs out of money, which is only a matter of time. We have a lot of it now and we need to stop it.”
Now, that sheds a different light on the alarmism that the Hale camp is peddling, doesn't it?
It's so late in this election cycle that campaigns have to spend their time and money getting out soundbite-size messages such as TV spots, and most of those at this stage take on a my-opponent-is-corrupt focus.
Specifically, Team Hale wants you to get worried that Spartz would let you get sick and die:
Spartz does not believe vital federal programs like Medicare should exist, which would put countless seniors at risk of losing their health coverage. In the middle of a global pandemic, that position isn’t just irresponsible, it’s flat out dangerous.”
But for anyone who cares to devote a little more thought to the matter, there does indeed exist an explanation of Spartz's position on health care.
As someone who experienced firsthand the many negative aspects of fully socialized health care while I was growing up in the former Soviet Union — including how those aspects contributed to the death of my father at the age of 41 — I am deeply concerned that so many aspects of health care in our country are now socialized as well. Therefore, I took a deeper dive into this issue when I became a legislator.
When I talk about the aspects, I mean consumer aspects I experienced such as: being uninsured as a small business owner; having corporate insurance and working crazy hours with little kids; paying for COBRA; purchasing high deductible insurance through the individual marketplace before the Affordable Care Act; being forced into the Affordable Care Act; and paying penalties for not having the Affordable Care Act due to its cost.
In this 2019 Indianapolis Star column, she goes on to provide a succinct yet comprehensive history of how government came to be so involved in health care. It covers much of the same territory as a 2012 Forbes article by Avik Roy. Government encroachment into the insurance market basically dates to World War II and the manufacturing sector attempting to circumvent wage and price controls by offering more fringe benefits.
As she brings her account up to the present, she says that we are now faced with two fundamentally opposite ways forward:
Partially socialized medical care also creates what Friedman called “political entrepreneurship,” where it gives incentives for politicians to compete for votes by offering new government services. Therefore, the state and federal governments have increasingly specified the coverage of insurance not common in other areas. Special interest warfare was fought in the political arena with protectionism from market competition, and competition to shift costs like a hot potato by using political influence. Special interest groups now represent virtually every disease, disability and health care service. As we all know the market empowers individuals, bureaucracies — special interests, and poor people is an excuse to transfer large sums of money to wealthy and healthy in all large bureaucracies.
Then there is the pharmaceutical market, which represents about 25% of our health care spending, and has the same perverse incentives, cost shifting, bureaucratic barriers of entry, and a convoluted pricing system, which led to consolidation, cost shifting and rise of oligopolies.
So, where do we go from here? As I mentioned above, we, the government, created a monster, and now we have two choices: acknowledge that we failed the markets and our people and go to complete government monopoly with absolute power to control prices and cost, which would be fatal for health care value, or have the guts to drastically reverse the course and restore the right competitive forces on the markets. A piecemeal approach has not been working and will not work. We must have a comprehensive and all-encompassing approach to eliminate barriers and deliver value through human ingenuity and incentives of free markets. Everyone and everything should be on the table and on the menu. We are all the losers in this socialized system, but the sick and poor lose the most. Let’s not forget: government is always the biggest problem.
Again I say, that answers the perplexity posed by the Hale claim that Spartz would be stupid enough to run on a platform of "I want to see large swaths of the public I want to elect me go without medical attention."
The free-market vision is a little tricky to make clear today, after decades of the post-American public being accustomed to thinking about government in terms of what it's going to do to make our lives better, and of candidates for office in terms of their various proposals for how government is going to do that.
Spartz and other actual conservatives are saying, "Don't think of government that way. Claim your freedom and take charge of your own destiny."
Leftists like Hale are scared to death that you might ever think this through. They want the populace to come ever-more to resemble cattle, easily herded into the pen and content with the daily ration of feed.
No comments:
Post a Comment