Another Idea

Jacob Sullum gives us his view on SCHIP at Reason. Read the whole thing, but here’s some snips:

The Framers would have insisted on nothing less, as reflected in the Constitution’s Health Care Clause. Oh, wait. The Constitution has no Health Care Clause. Nor does it include any other provision that authorizes Congress to spend taxpayers’ money on health insurance for the children of the working poor, the grandparents of the middle class, the nephews of the super-rich, or the kin of any other socioeconomic group.

[...]

When Bush vetoed the SCHIP bill, which would have spent an additional $35 billion over five years, he expressed concern about “federalizing” health care. “I believe in private medicine,” he said, “not the federal government running the health care system.” He also worried that opening SCHIP to families earning up to three times the poverty level (about $62,000 for a family of four) would move it away from its original goal of serving people too poor to afford insurance but not quite poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

It’s hard to reconcile Bush’s opposition to a bigger federal role in health care and his emphasis on strict means testing with the Medicare prescription drug benefit he championed, which is expected to cost $675 billion during the next decade while compelling middle-class taxpayers to buy Lipitor for retired billionaires. More generally, Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” if it means anything, means a willingness to spend other people’s money on sympathetic causes.

[...]

The intractability of these disputes is illustrated by divergent responses to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that between a quarter and a half of children covered by SCHIP would otherwise have private insurance. For supporters of “single payer” health care, this substitution of government for private coverage, which would become more common if eligibility criteria were loosened, is a feature, not a bug.

Instead of trying to resolve such issues at the national level, why not let each state go its own way, with results that vary depending on local values, the local cost of living, and the local health care situation? No federal money would mean that one state’s legislators could no longer force another state’s taxpayers to subsidize their generous impulses, but it would also mean no federal restrictions.

As for Sullum’s federalist angle, I’ve been saying that’s what we should do with public schools for a long time so we can benefit from a multitude of competing idea. I’m not a huge fan of Justice Brandeis (although I’m sure I stand like a mental midget in his shadow) but the one thought he had that should resonate with everyone was his idea of “laboratories of democracy.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.