A Case Against Universal Health Care

In Mark Steyn’s book “America Alone,” an argument is made that big government makes its citizenry dependent and eventually helpless, in a manner of speaking. Gerald Ford had a famous quote which speaks to this: “a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Many will argue that this is the classic slippery slope argument…the notion of a government turning against its people like Skynet in Terminator 2 is pure doomsday rhetoric. Steyn turns the quote on its head: “a government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back.”

American Alone’s thesis is that fanatical Islam is taking over Europe…because Islam is youthful and passionate, and Western Europeans are aging, self-centered and soft…partially because they’ve built a lifestyle around socialized government programs. But mostly because they aren’t reproducing fast enough to keep up.

Both of the reasons supporting Steyn’s argument tie directly into the socialized health care systems of these European countries. Government programs like universal health care are expensive. Mixed with the bureaucracies of government, very expensive. Once a society is used to the cushy benefits of a little socially equitable communitarianism, no mode of government will ever get the votes to reduce the program’s benefits. People are simply not willing to give up those benefits, and in countries like Greece and France, in a few decades there will not be enough working people to pay the taxes to keep the programs in place. The aging populations will bankrupt these systems. Greece’s pension liabilities will make up a laughably unsustainable 25% of its GDP by 2040.

It’s amazing that these countries can afford to insure every one of their citizens now, even with high income taxes. The truth is many can’t. They’ve had to outsource their defense programs to the United States and other countries, to defray the costs. Although outsourcing isn’t the correct word because it implies some sort of contract for payment. We offer our help for free. America is the ATM machine to the world. One could make a cogent argument that American taxpayers are paying for Canadian health care. If America elected to reduce its defense budget to European levels and provide universal health care to its constituents, it would no longer be able to offer its aid to HIV-infected African children, or help out with the next tsunami. The next time SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) infects Toronto hospitals, as it did in 2003, our CDC (Centers for Disease Control) scientists and doctors won’t be working all hours of the night to fill the holes in Toronto’s under-sophisticated health systems.

The “aged dependency ratio,” which is the number of elderly people receiving state benefits relative to the number of working-aged adults supporting them, offers an ominousness to the future of many Western countries. In 2000, America, Australia and Canada all stood at .26 seniors/working people. In 30 years, America will be at .47 (possibly unsustainable in an of itself), and Australia and Canada will be at .56 and .63 respectively. For Canada, this means that each working person will be financially responsible for the pension payments, health care coverage, and other benefits of two-thirds of another person. If you think reduced weekly work hours and increased vacation times will get the job done, perhaps you should take a beginning level economics class.

Americans live in a free country, and have come to expect to be able to choose between dozens of breakfast cereals and hundreds of automobile models, universities, and cable tv channels. Can we honestly say that we’d be willing to give up our ability to exercise choice when it comes to life and death decisions…that which we spend largest sum of our income…our health care decisions? Would we be willing to forego any choice and outsource the whole bit to Uncle Sam? If so, I think it would be because we don’t understand the implications…