Thoughts on Healthcare

A couple of days after the passage of the healthcare bill, I have a bunch of thoughts, as opposed to any kind of coherenet argument or rant.

My opposition was based on 2 things:

1. The rather concrete idea that the country cannot afford it. I don’t care what the CBO scores say, there is no way this bill will be budget neutral. I won’t be astonished when it’s “discovered” that the bill results in higher deficits and debt because it’s a given.

2. A fuzzier principle that the government shouldn’t be involved in healthcare markets to the extent that this bill makes it. I bristle at the notion that the government is telling me “Thou shalt buy healthcare, even though thou art healthy because we need your money to subsidize the unhealthy.” I just can’t accept that. Nothing argued to me has convinced me otherwise.

More generally, I think arguments used to advance this bill were largely fatuous and dishonest. The goal, from my view, clearly was to pass something, anything, with the endgame being that once the bill is passed, the argument shifts from “if” to “what shall we cover.” Only days after it’s passage, the talk of repeal seems half-hearted at best. Even the notion of constitutional challenges is outright mocked and viewed as a Hail-Mary attempt to end-run the legislative result.

More interestingly, polling of the bill seems to be improving, much to the relief of bill proponents. It will be interesting how that issue resolves itself over the coming months. One of the arguments against passage was that the ‘people’ opposed the bill. The counter-argument was that the bill’s popularity would surely improve once it was passed- it was just scare-mongering that was driving it’s popularity down, as opposed to principle opposition. I want to believe that opposition was principled, but I fear that I was wrong, despite my own principled opposition.

The last reaction I’ll comment on is an intangible sense of loss. I’ve always viewed myself as self-sufficient. I don’t ask the government, or other entities for that matter, to solve my problems. I solve them on my own, with the help of my family if required, to the best of my abilities and live with the results. My sense of loss is that this mentality of self-sufficiency in which I pride myself is a dieing breed in the country. If the breed is not, in fact, dieing then it is inarguably being asked to shoulder a larger share of the burden of making the country go. The self-sufficient supply retirement and medical care for the elderly, wages for the unemployed, welfare for the unemployed, medical help for the mentally ill, defense for the country at large. Now it will also supply healthcare for everyone else. I can only wonder how much further will we be pushed?

For me, there is no control over this either. I have no choice in the matter. This is brushed away in the form of “winners-and-losers” arguments. I have my dreams and hopes for what my kids can live for and do. But those don’t seems to matter. It’s been decided by someone else that the money has to go elsewhere to “help” someone I don’t know and won’t meet. I guess I’m supposed to feel good about that. Instead, selfish me, I’m a little irked at the thought that as hard as I and my wife work to provide for the kids, we now have to work that much harder to get to the same point.

In the spirit of honesty, I’ll state that I hope that the coming elections will be a “bloodbath” for those who voted for passage of this bill. I hope that every single politician who enabled it’s passage is removed from office. I would like to see the President voted out in 2012 in favor of some nobody. I’d like this bill to be looked back upon as an example of what-not-to-do by politicians. I hope that those elected would actually practice conservative governance. I hope that the bill is repealed and those who argued for it’s passage are forever shamed.

I don’t hope these things because I wish the country ill either. I think this bill, and the way it was passed, were bad for the country already. I think these things I hope would be good for the country because legislation shouldn’t be passed in this manner, and politicians should fear those it governs.

My fear is that none of this will come to pass.