August 06, 2007

Back from a week-long vacation. Tanned. Rested. Ready. Overflowing with vim and vinegar. Anxious to get back to work fighting for market competition in health care.

And now... depressed. Why, you ask? Because only minutes after returning to my desk, I am shocked to learn that I am utterly "immoral," in that I intend to "[steal] healthcare from babies."

No, I am not kidding. And it must be true, as these charges appear in the august pages of, respectively, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, giants of traditional journalism, on the op-ed pages of which appear the above measured words of the ineffable Paul Krugman and Ronald Brownstein, true giants of the trendy cocktail-party circuit. They are the ones who have informed me of this perfidy, with respect to which Yom Kippur cannot come too soon and no amount of fasting will be sufficient for purposes of atonement.

So: Precisely what have I done this time to earn such opprobrium? Well, it appears that Congress is on the verge of passing a massive increase in government health insurance "coverage" for poor children not eligible for Medicaid. And I oppose this! Motherhood, apple pie, and health care "coverage": Is there no limit---any at all?---to the depths to which I am willing to sink?

Now, to be fair---not that I deserve any such consideration---many of the newly eligible under this expansion of SCHIP will be neither poor nor children. And then there is the small matter that "coverage" is not health care, as anyone forced to endure the inexorable rationing rampant under such single-payer systems as those observed in Canada and the UK knows all too well. And, oh, by the way, have Krugman or Brownstein heard about the increasing difficulties encountered by Medicaid patients in efforts to find a physician actually willing to see them under the fee schedules imposed by the state governments? Well, I am certain that they have, but such details tend to disappear down the memory hole when opportunities to unleash "immorality" accusations and references to "babies" emerge. Yes, the schalami-schlice schocialism in health care attendant upon the proposed expansion of SCHIP promises---no, guarantees---a price squeeze on doctors and hospitals, with all the adverse implications obvious in terms of the long term impact on the supply of medical services and the development of medical technology. This, by the way, is what passes for "compassion" among the self-appointed guardians of morality, babies, kittens, and puppies, whose favored nostrums are utterly destructive no merely as a matter of principle, but as a matter of empirical truth.

Nor do Krugman and Brownstein bother with the eternal reality that resources are limited always and everywhere, so that the expanding costs and pressures engendered by their version of "compassion" lead to government choices---make that political choices---about who will be allowed to obtain what services. Krugman, by the way, in a rare moment of candor admitted this explicitly in an op-ed column in the NYT published December 26, 2005; perhaps he now believes that resources have become infinite in the last year and a half. And then there is the crowding out problem: Why should employers and employees pay for private insurance when the feds will provide it courtesy of taxes paid by that other guy behind the tree?

Yes, I could go on. But it would be wrong, and haven't I done enough wrong already? I guess vacations now are out---my wife is not going to be happy about this---and I will not be able to live with myself unless I somehow can earn back the trust, respect, and lofty opinions of Krugman, Brownstein, and other such defenders of morality in public finance. No more time off and no more baby killing for me: Idle hands indeed are the work of the devil. 666.

Posted by Benjamin Zycher at August 6, 2007 12:56 PM

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