Blaglash.com

First, I’d like you to know where I’m coming from.

I’m a white 23 year old male college drop out living in New York City and working for a startup.

I also have not had any sort of health insurance or reasonable health care for over three years.

The Health Care issue is among the most dear to my heart politically, but it’s a problem that is extraordinarily complex and one that I think most of my colleagues and peers take to an overly political level.

The problem: Too many Americans (myself included) do not have access to quality healthcare, or in some extreme cases (myself included) affordable health care at all.

The easy solution: Deciding that the government should pay for health care.

The much more difficult (and sometimes un-PC and even racist) but effective solution: Privatizing health care to the fullest extent of the free market.

Let’s begin with the easy solution above. Saying the government should pay for health care is something that is very easy to do. For instance:

“The government should pay for health care.”

See? That was very simple. Voting for someone who says the above is also relatively easy. I get on the train, go to the polling place, and I cast a vote behind a curtain. A little more difficult, but now I have achieved the self-righteousness of any American voter.

So the problem is solved, then, right? That was so easy! Now my candidate will vote on this issue with other winning candidates from behind pulled curtains, and my health care will be free. How easy that was!

I don’t want to talk about taxes. We all know that the government doesn’t get money to spend without taxes, but I won’t make the Republican fallacy of saying that more money to one program is under any circumstance a raising of federal taxes.

What I will talk about are the following points:

1. Federal Health Care programs are bureaucratic, expensive, and there will, under any system that could be implemented outside of campaign rallies, be racist and ineffective.
2. Giving the government control over my medical expenses and care, and to a largely fallacious extent, my body itself (see: A woman’s right to choose) is a really, truly frightening suggestion.
3. The United States has become a healthy, sovereign, and wealthy nation due to a complex economic system of free trade based on a system of supply and demand. It has its corrective and uneasy moments, for sure, but suggesting that the free market system is inherently flawed is also something so ridiculous and stark raving mad that it makes me wring my hands together.

So let’s start with my first bullet. Any health care system that promises free health care to any group of Americans is one that will cost a whole bunch of money. Which does mean higher taxes, but it also means governmental bureaucracies, an offset in market regulations and natural pricing due to demand, and a DMV atmosphere in health clinics.

We know this, no need to argue. We all know of the cost of free health care in Europe. So this point isn’t worth arguing, but instead the question: “Is it worth it?”

Well, realistically, it might be worth it. It would probably definitely be worth it if a Federal Health Care system could promise equal service and fair pricing to all Americans. But can we trust it to be fair, inexpensive, and high-quality?

We can not. Democracies and free markets work because of a complex balance of money and people, of supply and demand, and any program bent on disrupting the system will effectively tip the scales toward inequality.

Would I happily give up free health care for me for an extremely impoverished family of black children?

Of course. But what if doing so causes them longer lines at the clinic, lower quality in their doctors and medical professions, and, due to the offset of the free market and a heavy federal hand on the cost of drugs, a higher burden of expense on the entire country?

This system is not egalitarian nor is it utilitarian. It’s unjust and it is wrong.

So I guess I’ve also covered point three, which leaves me with just one more, which is perhaps truly the most important.

Pro-choicers (again, myself included) take note: giving the government power over how you take care of your body is very, very fucking scary.

It’s none of the business of the government what medications I take, how much they should cost (have you really thought about the generic drug situation? Imagine how slow and costly the web would be if each innovation was allowed years on the market at whatever price they feel like charging before competition was allowed. Scary stuff), who my doctor should be, or how much I pay for certain medical situations in comparison to other Americans based on the conditions I was personally born into.

So yeah, it’s really easy to say that certain politicians are evil and just easy to call them racist and say that they don’t care about black children, but it doesn’t solve a problem.

And sometimes problems that need to be solved aren’t as simple as calling someone a racist.

So let’s open up our health care system to the same standards of our market which dictate the price of most of all goods and services, watch the prices fall, watch the quality of service rise, and give the money we save to charities that help provide health care to the poor instead of just assuming talking and talking and talking will solve the problem.

Quick Aside to Jezebel: Trolling for clicks at the expense of the thoughts and opinions of the younger American electorate is deplorable and truly evil. I know you need to peddle your CPM advertisements, but only the fragile could agree that John McCain is himself the tyrannical cause of unfair labor laws in America.

Get real. You’re hurting more than your integrity.