The Morality of Statecraft

The Morality of Statecraft:

I started off in the "Passion for fairness" forum debating some things and I
got to say it got me thinking some more about the morality of Social-Welfare
solutions to problems.
Nationalized Health Care is a failure. In Canada we have people unable to
receive what we down state side would consider "vital" treatment. We
consider it vital because we would much rather have a high front-end cost
then a catastrophic rear end cost. The massive wait times for procedures,
often leading to people dying are not a unique thing to Canada. During the
big heat wave in France, the national doctors holiday killed all manner of
sick and elderly people. It killed them because the doctors weren't there to
provide any care for them. They were on vacation some place safe, and after
all these were just "old" people, some followers of the Hippocratic oath
they were. Is it any wonder France leads the world in patient suicides? Is
it any wonder France leads the world in patient sedation? In Great Britain
there is a hybrid system but there are also restrictions on the rights of
people to seek redress for medical grievance. In the Netherlands they have
combined National health care with a "right" to euthanasia and began a
policy of killing off all the patients who drain too much from the system...
often over direct and passionate refusals from the patients families.

Those who support the "right" to health care advocate the National
government as the cure to what ails, but is it the cure?

When doctors can eliminate Medicaid and cut their costs in half? When
doctors can eliminate all insurance and provide the patients with a higher
degree of care for the same cost or often less to them? All manner of
doctors providing sliding scale care and making more money when they
received compensated care?

If anything more government here would seem to only create more problems, as
it has in places like Canada and France. Modern health insurance in America
was created to fight of the benevolent associations. Theses associations of
citizens would often collectively negotiate with doctors to get the lowest
rates for their members. This was pushing real wages for doctors to a
cataclysmic level that was making medicine an unaffordable profession. I
believe patients have the right to the lowest cost care, at the highest
possible level of quality. And I believe that doctors have the right to earn
as much money as the market will support. And these two goals are not
mutually exclusive, but to achieve them the United States needs to design a
21st century health care system... not a new floor on the old and rickety
19th century health care system. The only solution is reinventing the whole
thing from top to bottom. A solution Unions, Doctors, Educators, and darned
near everyone in the health care system will fight tooth and nail. We won't
get comprehensive reform like that because it would require government to do
two things it is loathe to do... admit it is wrong, and was wrong... and
push lots of people who make lots of money into an entirely alien landscape.

So, as we can see a less government solution is the more moral solution to
the social justice of all those people who want health care, but is it only
health care?

The fact is the majority of Homeless people are mentally ill, or chronic
substance abusers. The same people who advocate; stipends for them, free
housing, or even to the extreme of San Francisco, which gives them the de
facto legal right to defecate and urinate wherever they darned well
please... These are the same people who say forcing them into mental health
facilities, or forcing them into treatment denies them their human dignity.
When I see a person so wracked with mental illness or addiction I can think
of many expressions to describe them but dignity isn't one of them.

Many other individuals are extremely disabled. There was once a time where
they would be aided by their families, by their churches, or by their
community but that is not the way our society today works. I was listening
to a rabbi talking about the Big G of god, versus the little g of
government. Instead of turning inward to their spiritual center to work as
communities had for years before, they give these people up to the little g
and struggle with a culture of debt that the government has blindly with
apathy encouraged. We've also through things like abortion and euthanasia
become a society that views death as more acceptable in situations like the
disabled then life, we've come to view life some times as a nuisance.

If we became a world of communities again, and if we restored the dignity...
the true dignity to our homeless people the vast bulk of them would
evaporate from the earth. But think of all the government agents, the
non-government organizations... think of all the people whose livelihoods
depend on their being homeless. These people will and do fight changes that
will actually help people.

For every year on the dole you live, you put a risk your child will spend at
least one year on the dole as an adult. This is a statistical correlation,
yet government resists programs to target people on those edges and instead
dumps money into programs like the minimum wage that predominantly profit
those already well off financially. The government does this because while
these programs fail to help the people they are designed to help, it feels
like it is helping and that is what the governments forays into social
relief are all about... feeling like you are doing the right thing. And as
we do these feel good programs, we experience real costs.