The NRO Corner has several recent posts about a consequence of governmental monopolization of health care that might once have sounded like wild speculation: Britain’s National Health Service now denies treatment to some people who haven’t taken proper care of themselves, and the government justifies neo-prohibitionist intrusion into personal conduct on the grounds that unhealthy habits lead to higher costs for the NHS.
Regulating individual actions is a natural step for a single payer health care system, which faces the daunting task of increasing the supply of medical care while reducing its price and maintaining its quality. The only way to square that circle is to improve relative supply by decreasing demand. I suppose that many advocates of setting up an NHS for our country are at least vaguely aware of that fact, but they mostly don’t care, so long as the targets are people who smoke or overeat. But what would they think if a rational healthocrat reasoned that AIDS is a very expensive disease, so nothing should be done for those who caught it through their own risky sexual practices? Or perhaps he would decide that banning deviancy has at least as good a cost-benefit ratio as prohibitions against smoking.
It’s truly odd that the Paranoid Left, convinced that America’s elected leaders routinely plot to destroy civil liberties for the most casual of reasons, doesn’t fear what might happen if Dick Cheney got to decide who would and wouldn’t have access to doctors, hospitals and medication. Are governmental conspiracies confined to Iraq, or are left-wing denunciations of it exaggerated and insincere, or does the Left hope for a perpetual political monopoly after 2008? Far be it from me to choose among those alternatives. The only other possibility is that many leftists are muddle-headed, which surely could not be the case.
One successful election has convinced many liberals that the happy days of Big Government are here again, when taxes will rise, businessmen will be cowed, labor unions will revive and, best of all, everybody’s health will become the government’s problem. It will be ironic if, having gotten their way, the same people mutter a decade from now, First they came for the
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