The End of Socialized Medicine?

Just as Hillary Clinton is about to get her hands on the nation’s health-care system, Peter W. Huber reckons it’s too late.

Universal health care is a “superstructure,” to use the Marxian term, built upon germ theory medicine.  You can eradicate cholera and neo-natal deaths with a universal one-size-fits-all program.  The problem is fairly simple and the solution is within the capabilities of government bureaucracy.

But the new medicine is life-style related.  If you eat too many Cherry Garcias, Huber writes, and you have a propensity for high cholesterol levels, then you are headed for trouble.

You can cure your cholesterol risk with a drug like Lipitor or you can fix it with healthy eating.

The government can’t really solve the problem of elevated cholesterol levels with one-size-fits-all bureaucracy.

For the government is in a bind. It subsidizes the health care of the feckless.  It the old days, this made sense because a universal program to eradicate tuberculosis really did benefit everyone.

But health care to correct poor life-style choices is different.  The healthy pay for the fecklessness of the feckless, and it ain’t cheap.

The passive, clueless, and feckless must get ruinously expensive, last-ditch care because they don’t show up until it’s too late for anything else, and universal means what it says.

That means that, sooner or later, universal health care will start to lose political support.

The pocketbook-healthy eventually tired of paying for welfare that persistently failed to end poverty; the health-healthy will tire of paying for health care that persistently fails to improve health. However selfless and generous people may be, responsible types eventually despair of trying to cure self-destructive behavior from a distance.

It’s an interesting theory.  But I think it is way out on the bleeding edge.  I’d say it will be a generation before we get real reform of health care.

There are just too many slacker liberal votes out there in favor of it.