By Philip Klein on 7.2.09 @ 6:10AM
There is nothing humane about government-run health care.
During an otherwise dull health care town hall meeting on
Wednesday, a woman identifying herself as Debby fought back tears
as she described her health predicament to President Obama.
In 1998, Debby said, she underwent radiation treatment to kill a
tumor -- but the radiation caused other health problems, making
it impossible for her to work. Now, she has another tumor, but
cannot get it taken care of because she doesn’t have health
insurance or qualify for government programs.
“Well, here, come on over here,” Obama implored her, motioning
Debby toward him. “We're going to find out what -- we'll get your
information and we'll see what we can do to help you.”
Embracing her, Obama reassured, “I don't want you to feel all --
like you're alone.”
He then used her situation to illustrate a broader point. “Debby
is a perfect example of somebody who we should, in a country this
wealthy, be able to provide coverage for her health care
problems,” he said.
The town hall meeting itself was highly orchestrated -- with a
small number in attendance and online questions being screened by
the White House. Even none other than Helen Thomas
complained to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the event
being staged.
During the session, Obama received questions from an advocate of
a socialized, or single-payer health care, a representative of
the liberal activist group Health Care for Americans Now, and a
member of the Service Employees International Union. “What can I
do, as a member of the union, to help you with your reform bill?”
the woman asked.
But the moment with Debby stood out. It was the sort of human
touch that Bill Clinton mastered and that Obama, though at times
emotionally distant as a candidate, has grown more comfortable
with as president. Back at a February town hall meeting, one
woman -- Henrietta Hughes -- asked Obama for
a home while 19-year old Julio Osegueda wanted the president to
help him get better benefits
at his job at McDonald’s.
No politician wants to tell those who are facing hardships that
the government cannot do anything to help, but the result is a
populace that looks to elected officials to take care of them.
There’s no polite way of telling somebody who is suffering that
government cannot insulate everybody from the vicissitudes of
life.
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of
blessings," Winston Churchill once said, adding, "the inherent
virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." And
nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to health care.
Government-run health care systems might guarantee coverage to
everybody in theory, but in practice they do not. "Access to a
waiting list is not access to health care," the chief justice of
the Canadian Supreme Court
wrote in a 2005 decision. The ruling came in a case brought
by a Quebec man who was told he would have to wait a year for hip
surgery in the country’s single-payer system, which rations care
to save costs.
Shona
Holmes, an Ontario woman, was forced to travel to the United
States to seek urgent treatment for her brain tumor after she was
told she would have to wait 6 months in Canada, by which point
she says she would have died. Of course, if Obama gets his way
and government takes over health care in America, then stories of
Canadians like Shona won’t have happy endings.
Obama dismisses the idea that he wants government to take over
health care as a mere “scare tactic.” In reality, Obama has
previously said he was a proponent of a single-payer system and
he maintains that it would be the ideal system if we were
starting from scratch. At the town hall meeting, he said that in
other countries a “single-payer plan works pretty well” because
if “you eliminate private insurers, you don't have the
administrative costs and the bureaucracy and so forth.”
Instead of supporting single-payer outright, Obama has been
pushing the idea of creating a new single-payer plan within the
current system that people will migrate to over time. He calls
this longer road to government-run health care a “uniquely
American solution.”
But if Obama wants to expand coverage and reduce spending at the
same time, the only solution is to ration care. There’s no way
that the government can cut costs by eliminating “unnecessary”
care without casting a wide enough net to prevent individuals
from obtaining care they deem necessary. In the end, there is
nothing more humane about a health care system run by the
government. In acting to help the Debbys of the nation, Obama
will create a new set of problems for many others.
UPDATE: The AP is
reporting that Debby was a volunteer for Obama who received
her ticket through the White House.
