A reason for health care reform | The Health Culture

We all know why Liberals want to make health care available for all Americans. Liberals have bleeding hearts and a proclivity for redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor.

They would agree with Peter Montague that “the growing gap between rich and poor has not been ordained by extraterrestrial beings. It has been created by the policies of government.” And government should fix it.

Conservatives, on the other hand, believe in the unfettered hand of the free-market system. It’s a system that may produce social and economic inequalities, but you can blame the individual for that, not government policies.

In the words of a quiet, courteous Georgia man who spoke at a town-hall meeting this summer: “We’ve got to do something about those people who can’t get insurance. … There has to be a safety net there. But I don’t want that safety net to catch too many people.”

Or, in the words of a South Carolina physician, speaking from his experience with patients, “From my perspective, there are people who really don’t deserve health care reform. … The ‘elephant in the room’ is that some patients … do nothing to care for themselves, take no responsibility for their well-being, are never accountable for their actions and will happily bleed any system dry, public or private.”

Disease and disability are incompatible with a fair market system

There’s an argument for universal health care that should appeal to conservatives. The idea comes from an essay by bioethicist Arthur L. Caplan, and it goes like this.

Conservatives believe that some people are wealthy because they’ve worked hard, while others are poor because they’re lazy. Inequality of outcome is perfectly fair, as long as everyone has the same opportunities. You get what you deserve.

Opportunities can’t be equal, however, unless everyone is equally healthy. In a highly competitive, capitalist society, it’s especially important to be healthy and free of disease and disability. Without your health, you can’t participate in the economy, either as a productive worker or an enthusiastic consumer.

A competitive economic system is fair only if the competitors have equal starting conditions: adequate food, shelter, education, and health. An infant or child with a disabling disease or a chronic health condition definitely lacks equal opportunity in a capitalist system.

Equal opportunity is the moral foundation of our economic system. Disease and disability are not compatible with a commitment to a fair market system that distributes resources efficiently.

It may be expensive to improve the health of the sick and to prevent differences in health status, but health inequities are not compatible with an economic system that rewards effort, performance, and individual achievement.

Shouldn’t that be sufficient reason to support universal health care?

Resources:
Arthur L. Caplan, The Concepts of Health, Illness, and Disease, in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter, Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, Vol. 1, p 233- 248.