The Health Care Debate

Wherever our healthcare system is headed in the future, we should ask ourselves some important questions along the way. We are each a patient or potential patient, voter or potential voter. We have a role in deciding what our healthcare system will look like in a year or ten years, but we also have a responsibility to figure out what we're willing to do to get there.

Below you'll find questions to consider as you figure out what kind of healthcare system you want in America. Background on these questions can be found in The Issues sections of this site. You can also follow the links in the questions for more information.

1. Do we have a moral obligation to provide healthcare to everyone as needed or is healthcare a commodity that should be subject to the same marketplace influences as other commodities?

2. What should the government's role be in providing access to healthcare for Americans?

I would like to get everyone's opinion on this issue. I believe that every American has the right to affordable health care and that seniors like my 84 year old parents should never have to choose between getting medical care and buying food. I am especially interested in this issue because I am a Vietnam veteran who is on the “Agent Orange” risk list and although I retired from the Army and have health insurance, many of my brothers- and sisters-in-arms did not retire and cannot afford health insurance and the VA puts their treatment and appointments off for six months to two years. If anyone should get medical care, should it not be our military veterans?

I am against a government funded national health care system as is in place in Canada, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, because “the government” isn’t in the medical business. I do not have the answer, but I do have lots of questions. I live in Florida and essentially asked this question on the Florida page and was urged to take the discussion to the main forum, so here it is. Fire away. . .

We make intelligent healthcare policy debate more difficult when allegedly educated and bright people pose questions this way:

Do we have a moral obligation to provide healthcare to everyone as needed or is healthcare a commodity that should be subject to the same marketplace influences as other commodities?

Healthcare is not susceptible to this kind of "either/or" analysis.

What is heathcare after all?

Healthcare is nothing but a series of goods and services provided by people (individually and in organized businesses). That is the case regardless of who pays for the healthcare.

The government can't do a thing by itself. The government can only act through people.

Those people (whether paid by the government or by private enterprise) respond to market forces in determining their interest and willingness to provide the goods and services that comprise healthcare.

No person will become a physician, invent a medicine, take a patient's bp, or change a bed pan unless market forces inform that person that such activity will be profitable over the long haul. You can no more divorce market forces from healthcare than you can separate the human from his nature.

That principle doomed the Communist economic system, which doomed its political system. Government can use force of arms to compel the providing of goods and services only for so long.

Market forces work on the demand side as well. How much healthcare would one consume if healthcare were free? As much as one "needs."

Who decides how much one needs? Either "one" or "someone else."

If it's "one" and the care is free, then "one" has the incentive to spend millions of dollars if that's what it takes to fix a bunion. But, on the other hand, if "someone else" gets to decide what is needed, that "someone else" may decide not to spend $100 for your heart replacement.

Market forces in the form of the incentives and disincentives at play upon that "someone else" influences whether that "someone else" makes the decision to buy you a new heart or not. If that "someone else" has the incentive to say "no" or a disincentive to say "yes," you can forget about getting your new heart.

Despite what we may want, we can no more repeal the laws of supply and demand (applicable to healthcare or anything else, for that matter) than we can the laws of human nature or the law of gravity.

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