Too Much “Hot Air”

Yours truly feels this cannot be allowed to slip by, under the radar.  One Ed Morrissey may know quite a bit regarding other subjects.  However, on this one frankly, he is, simply, wrong:

Government insurance will kill private insurance

As is the Reason writer he also cites, while omitting this paragraph:

…The best result of creating a parallel public insurance scheme is that the United States would end up with an explicit two-tier medical system in which privately insured Americans have better access to better medical care. Such two-tier health care systems already exist in countries with national health care schemes such as the United Kingdom and Germany. In the United Kingdom, more and more Britons are opting for private health insurance instead of remaining with that country’s National Health Service. Privately insured Americans would get higher quality health care, but because the market for medical innovation would be smaller, everybody will get worse care than they would otherwise have received had most health care not been nationalized…

That is carefully crafted double talk, which, unsurprisingly, manages to double back and inadvertently contradict itself.  In fact, it is at fundamental odds with Mr Morrissey’s and that Reason writer’s base assertion.  How so?

For a decade, yours truly has had regular, first-hand experience of the workings of the British National Health Service.  American conservatives who ignorantly “run against” the NHS are irritating.  Also, as the Wife once pointed out, the endless intellectual chicanery undertaken to try to make Britain look like some sort of health care “banana republic” when it most definitely is not, is tiresome in the extreme.

Yes, private insurance is all over the place here in “single-payer” Britain.  (As if that is now suddenly, to American conservatives, a bad thing?)  Curiously, though, in choosing to go private, those Britons (usually the far more well-off, by the way) are engaging in precisely the exercise of personal “choice” conservatives claim to wish to “preserve” for Americans.  Also, those Britons are clearly taking advantage of their ability to get “better care” based on their better ability to pay.

Don’t sound too “socialized” that.  In fact, it is socialists here who roundly forever criticize private for creating a “two-tier” health culture in which some are getting “better [private] care.”  Such immediately undermines the argument that under “single payer” in which private coverage exists (meaning Britain, not Cuba or North Korea), that everyone is forced into “worse care.”

Moreover, the NHS is now over 60 years old, so if we accept at face value that public coverage automatically “will kill off” private, there by now most certainly should be NO private of any consequence in the U.K., not a growing amount.  Interestingly also, private is often used to subsidize the public, as even the NHS happily admits:

…Singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor opened The Kensington Wing – the newly expanded and revamped private maternity unit at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital – during the hospital’s annual Open Day on Saturday 9 May…

…All profits from The Kensington Wing are reinvested in the hospital so that the NHS benefits directly from the private maternity unit.

In addition, the claim that “single payer” in itself undermines “innovation” holds no water given that never microphone shy U.K. doctors are overwhelmingly in favor of the NHS, and would be among the first to cite precisely that failing were it worth citing.

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Actually, what we seem to have here is less a cogent refutation of public v. private, than yet more wearying evidence some American conservatives remain adamantly determined to avoid confronting the obvious.  But that obstinacy does not alter the reality that American public opinion has been gradually shifting over the last 20 years: for a variety a reasons too numerous to mention here, health care is increasingly seen less as a business and more as a social obligation.  As it is here in Britain.

And as is public education.  However, before immediately attacking public education as conservatives are often so quick to do, consider this.  Conservative pundits regularly extol Thomas Jefferson; and educationally, Mr Jefferson was so thoroughly well-educated pre-public education that he enjoyed the likes of Thucydides in the Athenian’s original Greek.  Simultaneously, however, the mass of the people who worked Mr Jefferson’s estate and brought his dinner up from his kitchen could barely read.  Or couldn’t read, period.

Conservatives often appear to imagine themselves as having been Mr Jefferson, rather than grasping fully the more likely historical probability that they would far more probably have been those who maintained his roundabouts.  But any “two tier” educational system that has emerged in the last 200 years has also led to an America in which most now actually can read, and some few still can read ancient Greek just like Mr Jefferson.  Owing to educational “reforms” that helped bring this world about, are conservatives actually seriously attempting to make the argument that that public education was a grave policy error because, functioning alongside still private education, it led to education they suddenly now disparage as being “two-tier?”

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If so, conservatism is in deeper trouble than we had thought possible.  For isn’t it socialists, incidentally, who aim for “one-tier”: shared poverty?  And while we are (yet again) on this subject, are we conservatives so actually fearful Americans might learn a few other facts?  When will we ever be able to overcome the ideological illiteracy, in order to be able adequately to confront the real socialists?

Conservatives correctly distrust red flag wavers; give yours truly the world of Burke over Thomas Paine any day of the week.  And as Burke understood, embracing reform is inescapable.  Indeed, what happened to paying close attention to a “changing” world while keeping seats at the table, and striving to conserve what has worked well while helping facilitate required “changes” that also actually work?  Is that not what conservatism is about?

When did it become a gathering of 18th century-idolizing fantasists in which the club members recline under the apple tree, swapping tales of those bygone “good ol’ days” of “rugged individualist, manly” revolutionary New Hampshire?  Conservatives must force themselves to be able to discern the vital difference.  Doing so is not always easy, true, but the bottom line is if we conservatives fail to heed properly what the public wants, for a long time to come most of the public may well decide it doesn’t want us.