Side-Quest: Healthcare as a Human Right
The dark thoughts that have invaded my mind about the anarcho-conservative view of the world, and everyone else.
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I like to make a point of getting along with as many different kinds of people as I can. I have very few outright boundaries in this regard. Nazis (and neo-nazis, and white supremacists generally) are not part of my get-along-with group, of course. The rest are a case-by-case basis, but it’s safe to say, I get along with more people than just about anyone would be comfortable with.
This has obviously lead me to have many cordial discussions with folks from all kinds of interesting political backgrounds. I am what many on the left might call a “radical leftist”, while simultaneously being radically pacifist. I know, strange combination. Despite this, I can absolutely see there being pros and cons in most political ideas. I am able to put myself in the shoes of a person with other political ideals, most of the time.
Recently, I had a conversation with someone about my support for Healthcare as a Human Right. To them, the idea of Universal Healthcare was a form of socialism. In their opinion, introducing such a socialist measure into the United States would inevitably lead to the subjugation of the society, and loss of freedoms and rights.
I soon discovered other people who held very similar views to this one, too.
The thing is, I live in Australia. We’ve had Universal Healthcare since the 1970s, and it’s a thing in most of the developed world, too. It has lead to lower healthcare costs for everyone, higher quality of treatment, overall healthier societies, and a massive boost in life expectancy. As such, it is nearly universally-popular in this country, on both right and left.
We have also remained a free society.
The USA is one of the few places in the developed world without Universal Healthcare. Consequently, the USA comes dead last in almost all categories of healthcare among all these nations. In some measures it’s not even close, it’s a distant last, according to the Commonwealth Fund which does yearly reports on this.
The following two charts taken from the Commonwealth Fund’s yearly Mirror, Mirror report illustrate the point:
Yet these points were not persuasive to any of the individuals I’ve spoken to so far who disagree with me on it.
It took me a little while, but I did finally start asking the right question: what did they feel was wrong about a Single-Payer System?
The answer: Taxation.
Taxation as “Theft”
The view was put to me in the way of an old French thinker and author on Economics, Frédéric Bastiat, who wrote a book called “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen”, about the visible and invisible effects of policy decisions. Bastiat’s main point was about protectionism, but the individual who shared this with me was using the same analogy to say that taxation is wrong, because it takes hard-earned money from one person and gives it to another person who has done nothing to earn it, resulting in unseen impacts on the rest of the economy.
The "other person” isn’t a reference to the tax collector themselves, nor the politicians necessarily. It was in reference to ones neighbours, the other people who share the space in which one lives and works, as well as their children. Those who make use of the infrastructure and services made available by the state through tax-funded programs. (A little ironic, considering everyone benefits, not just “other people”)
Taxation is a sticky subject for the right-wing, and always has been. Even in the most moderate conservative, there is an undercurrent of Darwinian social thought: each human achieves worth through the value they are able to obtain for their labour on the open market. People who are poor are more often than not - according to such a view - lazy and burdensome. People who are wealthy are - according to such a view - industrious, innovative and enterprising. Their circumstances are dictated by their choices.
That’s not even a hot take, that’s just the way they see it. It’s not even a view that is exclusive to those that have “made it”: it’s quite common among the lower echelons in economic terms. They see their equally-poor neighbours as just lazy and burdensome, while they see themselves as merely temporarily embarrassed, momentarily unlucky.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with having this view. To a certain extent, we are our own engines of value. We can choose how and when to make use of ourselves to produce our own value. That’s the whole premise on which capitalism is based, right? Well, sort of. There are some exceptions.
Actually, a lot of exceptions.
The vast majority of exceptions come down to health, and a lot of it is not necessarily a result of any choices one could have made knowingly.
Genetics plays a more important role in our lives than we can ever imagine.
Even still, here’s perhaps the key question to answer, which I feel would reveal a lot about ones personal value system: should someone that has no money be refused life-saving care?
We should ignore entirely the reasons for their economic circumstances, and instead focus on the value of that human life in general terms. To rephrase the earlier question: should they be allowed to die because they could not afford the treatment that would save their life?
In previous iterations of this debate over the years, one of the most common responses to this is that we should let charities step in to help. However, if that were an effective measure, the average person in the United States should have better access to healthcare than they do today. Instead, they are a distant last among developed nations. Another common response has been “well, they made the choice not to get insurance, so it’s really their fault.” This assumes of course that an individual with no money can afford health insurance, which makes no sense.
Then, their eyes inevitably turn toward the reasons for that person’s economic circumstances. The question then becomes: is this person worthy of life?
By what measure such worthiness can be determined is not clear. However, let us assume for a moment that such a person were deemed worthy, by whatever measure one might choose to use. Is that enough to then justify providing them life-saving care paid for by the collective society?
If the answer is “yes”, then you must support some form of taxpayer-funded healthcare program.
Here we can make better use of the analogy of Bastiat: Some see only their money, and do not see the human life. It’s not that they necessarily favour money over the lives of other people, it’s just that they have not yet become aware of this particular choice.
The fact is, the United States has had their private Healthcare system in place forever. If it were the right system, they wouldn’t be dead last in almost every single metric. If it were the right system, it would be working. It is not, and as a result, people are dying younger and more often from treatable illnesses than in any other developed nation on earth.1
I am not naive to the human ability for cognitive dissonance. In fact, my conclusion must be that it is due to cognitive dissonance that such views can become established in the minds of good people. Those I have been having discussions with are, as best as I can tell, genuinely good people. They don’t want anyone to die just for being poor. They don’t want their neighbours children to die from treatable illness because their parents didn’t have the money.
Of all the vast constellations of political thought we can agree or disagree on, very few of them are ultimately tied to ones moral compass. This is, unfortunately, one of those few.
The fact is: healthcare is a human right. There is no way around it. All human beings should be given every possible opportunity to live. Without universal healthcare, poverty can mean death.
If providing healthcare to all, and paying for it with taxes - or “theft” if you like - can prevent death-by-poverty, then it is extremely difficult to argue against it save for questioning the value of a human life.
So long as a person is alive, they have the opportunity to improve their circumstances. Such opportunities are not available to the dead.
Thank you for indulging me in today’s side-quest into this age-old political issue. Meanwhile, my post on the history of chemical weapons is still in progress. It will be a long read. Stay tuned for that in the (hopefully) very near future.
An extra special thank you to my paid subscribers, and those who have donated to the coffee fund. You’ve made it possible to continue to provide these articles for free to everyone. I truly don’t have the words to express how wonderful that is. Thank you.
Until next time.
I may be guilty of a little hyperbole, but not by much.
So good, Nicholas, and also a subject very near and dear to my heart because I am medically disabled and what many of the right wing would consider to be a useless eater. That fact has always nagged me deep within my heart, but now considering the people who are currently running roughshod over our lives and our country, the threat is made so much more real with every passing day. I fear that with my medical issues, I may not survive another Trump presidency, especially if we wander helplessly into another pandemic unsupported. 😟
Who is to be enslaved in order to fulfill this inflation of right. With every right comes a corresponding obligation.