So you think you want government heath care?

“Universal health insurance” is one of the zillions of things that sounds great in theory, but in practice is less than perfect. Mark Steyn reprints a column he wrote four years ago on that subject. Did you know that it’s illegal to receive medical care from anyone other than the government in Canada?
I’ve never quite understood the Church hierarchy’s position on this matter. From what I’ve read, it considers health care to be a “human right,” which I don’t get: how can you have a “right” to a good that may or may not exist? Put another way, if there aren’t any MRI machines or cardiologists in rural Namibia, how can you have a “right” to use those things?
Or is it a question of access — that is, no one should be denied access to health care based on their social status, race, etc.? That doesn’t seem to be what the hierarchy is saying, though. Skimming through the documents produced by the Vatican and NCCB, they believe people have a positive right to health care, that if an individual needs it, someone is obliged to provide it to him.
That opens up a raft of questions. First of all, who is obliged? The state, I’d assume, since the documents that address the subject seem to be directed towards governments. But that means the state must remove one good — money — from a group of citizens to pay for heath care. What if the people who receive the care could afford it by reducing their consumption of luxuries (cable TV, eating at restaurants, petty gambling, etc.)? Does the state still have an obligation?
You hear often in the U.S. about those 37 million people without health insurance. But they fall into two categories: the young and healthy, and the poor. Can we agree that if you’re healthy, you don’t need insurance nearly as much — and if you do, it only needs to cover emergencies? And the two categories overlap quite a bit — younger people make less money than older people because they have less experience. Why would a 23-year-old college graduate need a comprehensive insurance policy? And why would we treat him the same as a 38-year-old poor single mother caring for two children?
More: what kind of health care are we supposed to provide? Everything from routine doctor visits to extensive cancer treatments? Bandages, or just things like prosthetic limbs? Should every cancer patient be flown to the Mayo Clinic?
Not to mention that having a single entity controling all, or nearly all, of a good is an invitation to abuse. Why is it that everyone can see the danger in having one corporation control, say, the oil supply, but somehow if the government controls the medical system it is immune to human frailty?
When government sticks to basic public functions (defending the borders, stopping crime, enforcing contracts, etc.), it generally doesn’t interfere with family life. When government has to take care of the population, by providing for the necessities of life, it will treat its citizens like a pestilence.
That’s why Western Europe is slowly depopulating: its socialist states don’t want to deal with so many people, so they discourage larger homes and drain families of money through confiscatory taxation. By contrast, in most of the rest of the world, the government doesn’t directly provide private goods like health care or retirement pensions, so they don’t care as much how many kids each family has. Socialism does not co-exist with the Culture of Death. Socialism is the culture of death.
I know that much of this is grounded in the “universal destination of material goods,” that all things have their origin in God and thus will return to the Creator at the end of time. However, that presumes that there are a finite number of particular goods in the world. My employer gives me money in exchange for the work I produce. If I sit at home all day eating Cheetos and watching TV, I am not producing anything (except a bad example for my kids), for a net loss of goods in the world.
There is not a finite amount of “health care,” the way there is a finite amount of land on Earth. Its existence is dependent on human activity and not natural phenomena. The question is how to make sure those who are truly needy get the medical care they need, not how to snare everyone — rich and poor, healthy and sick — into a gigantic, unworkable government bureaucracy.
I’ve heard it said that the Church has much to say about how goods ought to be used, but not much about how goods are created. Much of that topic is outside its competence as the final authority on faith and morals, but the bishops should consider giving us some guidance as to how we can address the question.