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Republicans as obstructionists

by Greg Krehbiel on 8 September 2009

I saw a headline this morning that Obama is saying his critics don’t have an answer to the health care problem.

He’s right.

Republicans are stuck in a hard place. They can’t go along with a further socialization / centralization of health care. But if they try to be consistent in their arguments against socialized medicine, they’d have to go against Medicare, which is political suicide. (And it’s what they get for a lack of principle.)

As I’ve said before, Palin and company are completely right about “death panels,” but I haven’t heard any Republicans willing to say the honest truth — that health care resources are not infinite, and that somebody — whether it’s a government panel, an insurance company, or the family gathered around the coffee table looking at the bank statements — has to decide that some treatments in some cases simply aren’t worth the money.

A little while ago I saw some viral thing on Facebook about “nobody should die because they can’t afford health care.”

That’s precisely the kind of silliness that makes the whole debate impossible. Of course people have to die because they can’t afford health care, just as people have to die because they can’t afford Volvos. It’s sad, but unavoidable. And as health care technology increases, it will be even more true.

For example, let’s say that Bill Gates wanted to live as long as possible, so he hired a team of scientists to come up with treatments to keep him alive. Let’s say he gave them a budget of a $1 billion. They might come up with end-of-life treatments that keep him alive, but cost $1 million a day.

Gates can afford it. But there’s no way that sort of thing could be done for every American.

Our culture has “progressed” (or “deteriorated,” depending on how you look at it) to the point where most people believe that some level of care should be available to everybody. Okay. I can go along with that, depending on where you draw the line. Part of our problem is that our current system doesn’t account for that, and that has to be fixed.

Yet we haven’t come to this consensus honestly, and we haven’t discussed the other side of the coin, which is that some level of care can not be available to everybody. No matter how many verses of Kum Ba Ya we sing.

If there was an honest Republican out there, he’d be pressing this issue. The question is not whether care will be denied to some people in some circumstances. That’s an unavoidable fact. The question is who will decide, and on what basis. The government? An insurance company? Private individuals / families? Employers? Doctors?

Obama is pushing for one solution, which Republicans don’t like, but they don’t have the courage to propose an alternative, because they’re not willing to be the ones to burst the Barney and Friends bubble about everybody getting all the care they need.

2009-09-08  »  Greg Krehbiel