Thank God this isn’t the problem we had feared it was going to be, but let’s pretend that we were faced with a situation where hospitals had to ration ventilators. How would you have them do it?
I read an opinion piece this morning about how horrible it would be for a government agency to take a ventilator from an old person and give it to a young person.
My reaction was … what do you want them to do? Take it from a poor person and give it to a rich person? That’s the free-market approach.
It’s true that health care is a limited resource that has to be rationed, and as a general rule, the best way to ration a limited resource is through a free market.
That being said, there are some commodities that we don’t want to be rationed entirely by the market. Food, water, shelter, and healthcare are usually among them. For those commodities, we want a mostly free market.
There are many problems with the idea of a government committee creating rules to ration health care. One of the most obvious is that they will inevitably have a political and/or ideological agenda. Another, less obvious problem is that many people won’t agree with the rules the “experts” come up with.
Another big problem with government-run healthcare is that it will hide behind this idea that they’re acting for the common good, but you know perfectly well that the politically connected will still get preferential treatment. Stalin’s mother is not going to be on a waiting list for a ventilator.
Yet another problem is that central control stifles innovation. We want people to have the freedom to try new ideas.
This is part of the reason the healthcare debate is so difficult. We have to navigate a messy collection of values. We want free-market principles to drive innovation and to allocate scarce resources, but we don’t want the poor guy’s ventilator given to the rich guy’s kid. We don’t want to kill grandma to save the young person, but … well, in a way we do. And honestly, so does grandma. And we want to be able to provide some level of care to even the poorest person.
I don’t know enough to navigate between all these choices, but we shouldn’t cheapen the argument with simplistic slogans.