Healthcare Debate Presentation

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(What follows is a rough transcript of an opening statement I had the opportunity to deliver at a sort of gentleman's debate on health care reform. The subject is libertarian philosophy and its implications on the idea of socialized medicine.)

Who owns you? Let?s make that a bit less metaphysical: who owns your body? The libertarian, the individualist, answers that with a resounding voice: You own your body, and no other entity can be logically or morally said to own it. That philosophy of self-ownership has repercussions on the matter at hand?the notion of ?Universal (or Mandated) Healthcare?. If you own yourself, your body, then you have the power of making choices regarding how it is treated, medically.

But this is not currently the case, of course, in practical terms. Currently, the decisions regarding how your body is treated are, in most cases, made by whichever insurance company represents you. And, because the insurance company is so well-insulated from you, due to laws that bind you to a very narrow array of options (regulation such as is mentioned below), they can make decisions about your care that you and your doctor wouldn?t make. The statist, the collectivist, looks at this situation and refers to it as a free market, when it is anything but. But if he convinces us that it is, he may then say ?Ah ha! Free-market health care has failed!? He may then attempt to sell you on the idea that your lack of power over your care can only be answered by surrendering even more of that power to an even larger corporation?government.

Whether our lack of power in any particular instance is being unable to afford healthcare which is artificially priced high by such things as (in this state alone) mandates requiring insurance companies, and thereby consumers, to cover some 38 maladies, the majority of which we may never even be at risk for, or simply having decisions made at the corporate level with which we do not agree because the corporation knows that we are restricted by regulation from shopping elsewhere, we cannot allow ourselves to be convinced that abandoning our choices ever further, and an even more-insulated monolith of medical decision-making, is somehow going to fulfill a host of ludicrous promises, (an idea which flies) in direct contradiction to any practical reason, historical data, and real-world example, and give us what we really desire, which is more control, more involvement, in the decisions that govern our own lives.

The libertarian philosophy leads to one, from this seat, seemingly obvious solution to the issue at hand: decentralize the decision-making. Stop using laws to tie insurance to employment, and geographical location, and allow competition to drive down prices while rallying innovation, as it has for every market in which it is allowed to, from cell phones to laser eye surgery.

Let us be honest in our assessments: history tells us that once this government program has been created, it will not be abandoned, regardless of how horribly it may fail, and will likely be expanded far beyond its original intent. If we truly believe that each individual owns his body, we must make a methodical and logical examination of where such proposals will vest ownership of the individual. And if one day, ten or fifteen years hence, we are to visit the hospital, and have a decision made by a group of state-appointed experts about whether or not our disease is worth treating, our life worth the expense to society of saving, we may be assured that those experts, and the state they represent, are claiming the ownership of our lives.


(Thought that you guys might enjoy. I got to deliver this to a group of thirty or so Marshall students.)