A Response to Health Care Post

I feel that it is necessary to begin with the title of this piece itself. Republicans, of course, are not proposing to repeal healthcare--that statement is inane--they are intent on repealing the regulatory legislation on health insurance and passed by the past Congress and signed by President Obama. This is a deliberate confusion that liberals make to refute libertarian ideas, one which dates back 150 years to the famous French economist Frederic Bastiat. Bastiat writes:

"Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all...They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State."

This is an important point in that your argument is built upon the notion that undoing health reforms would be tantamount to eliminating healthcare. It would not be so.

Second, you charge that the January 19 vote to repeal the legislation was "partisanship at its finest." The vote to repeal the legislation passed with a far larger majority (245 votes) than did the original bill (218), so would it not be fair to describe the legislation as "partisanship at its finest"? Additionally, 3 Democrats voted against their party in favor of repeal, whereas no Republicans voted against their party in its favor at the time it was originally passed. 38 Democrats even voted against the bill. Your charge of high partisanship is eminently a double standard.

When you venture in to deficit analysis, your reasoning is terribly misleading. First, you fail to note that the legislation has been gamed to produce a favorable outcome for Democrats at the Congressional Budget Office. For example, the bill pays for 6 years of subsidies with 10 years of taxes by delaying the start of subsidies by four years. Naturally, this budget trick will become obvious in a decade when it is discovered to be insolvent. The idea of any budgetary savings from this legislation is a statistical artifact and a convenient political myth for Democrats. Second, "fiscally responsible" is not increasing taxes more sharply than you increase spending -- the nature of the President's health policy -- it is reducing the size and scope of government through cuts to both spending and taxation.


While the definition of a right is a topic outside the scope of this reply, suffice it to say that the idea of healthcare as a right is utterly inconsistent with the rights of Americans at the federal level. Observe, for example, that the Bill of Rights as framed by our Founders safeguard negative liberty, as opposed to the notion of "positive liberty" espoused by those hungry for centralized authority. Rights "to" something, such as healthcare, are positive; rights "from" something, such as tyranny, are negative. Consider, additionally, the implications of your immediate moral assumption that "health care is a right for all human beings." If A is considered a universal right, than why not B, C, D, and so forth?

Your third assertion is that "there [sic] lack of choice has not lead [sic] them to miss out on anything." This is plainly untrue. The world operates on the idea of scarce resources -- this should be familiar to the reader -- and the efficiency of their allocation is the operative answer to whether the world is prosperous or poor. Fundamentally, there is an enormous opportunity cost to mandating that the government provide healthcare. The required levels of taxation alone are enough to crush an economy -- consider the slew of debt crises across Europe -- and the government is forcing a decision upon its constituents. They must trade the set of all possible outcomes (using that money to attend college, open a business, buy equipment, etc.) for a suboptimal one that operates in a zero-sum, not mutual-gain, economic paradigm.

As to your final point, I would remind you of the Democratic heroes who strove to achieve a goal that many naysayers deemed to be unattainable. Your dismissal of our own goals is unwarranted.

I write this in good faith that I have clarified the issues at stake for you and whoever else may happen to read this response.


Best,
Evan Soltas