Liberals on Healthcare in One Fel Swoop

My idiot liberal cousin posted a link to the Bill Maher show which I usually avoid like the plague because he’s a contender in the race for smuggest media personality in circulation today, but as usual, I’m drawn to the fishbowl cuckoo’s nest of the liberal mind like a moth to a flame.

Somehow the debate moved from gay marriage (on which no opinions were offered) to univeral healthcare and they started talking about profiteering in health care.  One of the panelists made a misleading nonsequitor that I’d like to point out: “Healthcare is the only industry where quality hasn’t gone up and cost has gone down.”  Not only is that not true (costs generally do not come down in any industry unless qualify is sacrificed), there’s a very dangerous angle to healthcare that so many proponents of single payer/big brother healthcare are either oblivious to or willfully ignore: R&D costs.  The costs to find new medicines for age old illnesses is enormous, particularly because trying to test new medicine on human subjects carries an astronomical litigation risk (not to mention astronomical regulatory barriers).

If you’re a proponent of universal healthcare, I have a homework assignment for you.  I want you to do a comparsion between new drugs (i.e., cures) coming out of American companies financed by our current, evil for-profit healthcare industry versus new drugs coming out of every nation which has universal healthcare combined.

I’ll give you a hint: America produces almost all of it.  And why?  Because they have the money – and the incentive – to do so.

Take away a profit motive from the pharmaceutical industry and it disappears.  Say goodbye to all advances in medicine.  All.  With the exception of a few new surgical techniques that only slightly mitigate risk or reduce time on the operating table, the number of medical advances coming out of this country dwarves the rest of the world by such a large degree that it isn’t a stretch to say that America carries the advancement of medicine.

So the next time you bear witness to – or espouse yourself - the glory of a single payer system, unless you can explain how and why new drugs will continue to appear on the market, you need to weigh the overall good of finding new cures or applying existing ones more often, even to people who can’t pay.

But here’s the one fel swoop that explains the liberals’ love with universal healthcare.  To quote Bill Maher, “But this isn’t like any other industry [where you can profit off of goods sold].  This is people’s health!”

No, Bill.  It’s exactly like every other industry.  Watch me use your same reasoning to explain why everything should be government-provided to everyone, even the poor, unemployed, and lazy.

If you don’t breathe, you die.  Fortunately, air is free.

If you don’t drink, you die.  Fortunately, water is essentially free – we have public restrooms, water fountains, etc. all over the place.

If you don’t eat, you die.  Therefore, food should be provided to everyone free of charge.  (Guess what, we already have this one covered via food stamps and homeless shelters.  Gosh, we’re swell).

If you don’t heat your house in the winter, you die.  Therefore, all utilities should be provided to everyone free of charge.

If you don’t have a car, you can’t get to work.  Then you can’t afford all of the things that aren’t free yet, so therefore ,you die.  Cars and gas should be provided to all Americans free of charge.

This is people’s health we’re talking about!

Ultimately, all of the things I’m talking about – food, shelter, even water, and medicine have to be provided by people and those people have to be paid for their time, effort, and expertise.  When you take away these peoples’ chances or rights to profit from their services, what drives their incentive to continue to deliver these services?  The goodness of their hearts?  Give me a break.  Are you really that naive?  Are you really that idealistic that you think people are going to tirelessly work to provide you with goods and services and get nothing (or less than they could otherwise get doing something else) in return?  99.9% of the people who would say yes to this question have never spent a minute of time in their lives doing volunteer work, but in their worldview, other people will even if they won’t.  Fools.

Human nature is immutable and more powerful than your ideas.  Don’t make a plan based on how humans should function – make a plan based on how they do function.  It’s a waste of energy to think or expect people to change.  They won’t.  We have to work with what we have – and what we have are inherently selfish, inherently lazy people who nearly always do what’s in their own best interests with total disregard or indifference to the interests of everyone around them.  The best way to get people to get off their asses and do things – like work a society – is to give them some incentive.  Make it their interest to do something and they’ll do it.  Give them a speech about helping everyone and working together and they’ll ignore you and go back to watching satellite TV, drinking beer, and procreating new wards of the state.

Your idealism doesn’t do you or us any good.  For the love of god, come back down to earth.