Healthcare Comparison

As luck would have it Barbara Kalbach had her column, “Brass Tacks from Rural Iowa” published on the same page in the Chronicle as my “Thoughts on Healthcare.”

Mrs. Kalbach is “a 4th generation family farmer, retired registered nurse, and board member of Iowa CCI Action.” Iowa CCI stands for Citizens for Community Improvement. As far as I know they formed as a response to the rapid move of hog farming from outdoors to indoor confinement.

In my column, I tried to make sense of healthcare costs by going through the shift from individuals paying for their own to a collectivized system. I hesitate to go here (because I hate to acknowledge the existence of human beings viewed as a blob rather than as individuals), but it has to be illustrated that the common good can be a measure of the overall well-being of individual people.

A friend recently described the medical care systems of other Western countries as “single payer.” “Single payer” has become an endeared term as a compassionate and efficient way to deliver medical care, as contrasted with our supposedly unfeeling profit (eek!) centered and exploitive one.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have no love affair with Donald Trump, I just dislike his irritating opposition. I think I have plenty of company there. The issues can’t be classified as left or right, Democrat or Republican. If we value individual sovereignty, we are ignored by both sides, Trump and anti-Trump, and the mainstream media.

Mrs. Kalbach’s column, “Chickens coming home to roost” laments lost federal funding for healthcare due to the government shutdown. As you will see, Mrs. Kalbach ignores individual sovereignty as well.

Here are some things featured in Mrs. Kalbach’s column:

Democrats want to ensure that “healthcare premiums” don’t go up.

The “Big, Ugly Bill” will not only cut $2 trillion from “our Medicaid program,” it terminated Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies. In the past four years ACA marketplace plans went from 11 million to over 24 million people.

It’s a dire situation; 800 rural hospitals are at risk of closing.

She says some of these 24 million people are small business owners in our communities. Language like this reminds me of Republican Randy Feenstra. “Our communities” is a collectivist term. Gig workers, independent contractors, and “our nation’s” farmers are listed as other victims in this tragedy.  Like in Feenstra’s propaganda, “our nation” owns me. I feel so loved.

The other side of the coin is this:

Gig workers, independent contractors, and farmers who work hard, plan for the future, and are responsible for providing us with food, machinery, and other necessities of modern life, finance these programs and the part of their earnings that do so, are then not available to improve their own businesses.

Think of the small town bar/restaurants near here that have opened lately. Did these places simply fall into the hands of the owners like Mr. Bean falling out of the sky onto the cobblestones? No, the owners saved over a period of years. They borrowed from someone who trusted them to repay. They scrubbed, remodeled, learned recipes all their waking hours to serve paying customers.

None of them would resent helping people in need. But they know best where their savings can do the most good. A successful restaurant can provide jobs. It can make good money and that’s why they took the risk. There’s hardly a riskier business; with health concerns, fragile inventory, and the uncertainty of fickle clientele. But as the business grows, regular customers come back, word spreads; the owners accumulate savings. They remember the hard times and the helping hands they received as they grew. They see people in need and give, because they’ve been there.

Some of them are taxed enough in support of government charity that they can’t afford to make their dreams come true. New jobs aren’t created so other people aren’t lifted into productive roles and are then added to the government charity pool. Store fronts remain empty.

I hear people recite Bible verses about helping the underprivileged as justification for theft or socialism epitomized by the ACA or Medicaid, and it reminds me of the General Welfare Clause in the Constitution used as justification for ignoring the rest of the entire document that is meant to protect us from legalized theft.

The doubling of ACA plans indicates more than increased need. It indicates that the gravy train has been discovered. The Utopian ideal in the Soviet Union didn’t fail because of Ronald Reagan’s hawkish rhetoric or exorbitant “defense” spending. It failed because the gravy train was discovered and productive people gave up and went to the receiving end. Like Margaret Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.”

It might seem compassionate in the short term. But the Eighth Commandment shouldn’t be obeyed only because it’s the word of God. We shouldn’t steal because it ruins an orderly society, causes resentment, and promotes parasitism. As is the case in our aggressive foreign policy, enthusiastic proponents of our socialized medical system do so because they want somebody else to pay, not them.

Please continue the discussion with a letter to the editor or directly to me at: 4selfgovernment@gmail.com