More healthcare anxiety
Heather Richardson Higgins writes in the Wall Street Journal that the Democratic approach to healthcare runs against “who we are as Americans”:
In these proposals, human beings aren’t individuals with freedom to contract as they see fit and make their own best judgments, but interchangeable widgets for whom rules should be fashioned and enforced based on age, or quality of life, or some other metric. Bureaucrats would evaluate whether one is young enough to warrant a pacemaker or a hip, or sufficiently long gone from a hospital to justify readmission. Medicine would become a one-size-fits-all bureaucracy, not an art, in which the physician would face real risks for deciding that the bureaucratically approved “effective treatment” isn’t what works in a particular case.
It makes no sense to try to achieve a bipartisan consensus when the fundamentals underlying the Democratic approach are so contrary to the entire foundational idea of who we are as Americans. We’re the country that believes that individuals have the right not to have their decisions interfered with, and that individuals are best able to make those decisions that most affect their life and happiness. Nothing could be more central to that than the ability to control one’s own health and the health options of loved ones.
I can’t tell if it’s strategy or substance, but the opposition to any kind of public takeover of healthcare has subtly shifted in the last week. Previously, critics were worried that a government bureaucracy would result in poor quality of care and bad management. Now the opposition is rallying around idea that a solution that requires bureaucratic decision-making either results in morally dubious outcomes, or actually threatens values of liberty and choice.
–Sam
Healthcare reform raises tough moral questions
A couple of Washington Post columnists offer takes today on moral grey zone we’ve entered through the “death panels” and rationing debate.
This type of question is unavoidable when resources are scarce and planners take charge. They seek to rationalize the inefficient medical decisions of families, doctors and insurance companies. But the very process of imposing a rational structure gives government extraordinary power. And the approach taken by planners is, by necessity, utilitarian — considering the greatest good for the greatest number. Decisions cannot be made on a human scale.
It’s not an outrage. It’s surely not a death panel. But it is subtle pressure applied by society through your doctor. And when you include it in a health-care reform whose major objective is to bend the cost curve downward, you have to be a fool or a knave to deny that it’s intended to gently point the patient in a certain direction, toward the corner of the sickroom where stands a ghostly figure, scythe in hand, offering release.
–Sam
Good reads
More from the “blogs I just came across” series. The Washington Post “On Faith” section has a blog called Under God which bills itself as a “daily look at the news and what we do in the name of god.” The blog addresses many of the same contemporary issues we look at here from the perspective of what religion says about right and wrong. Quite an interesting read.
-Marc
Reining in predatory lenders
In a The New Republic article, Alex Ulam suggests that government should do more to help the victims of predatory lending schemes.
-Marc
Are guns covered in the public option?
Is violence the antithesis of democratic government–or at the heart of it?
Writing about the sudden presence of guns outside healthcare town halls, E.J. Dionne suggests there’s a deeper problem at stake:
There is a philosophical issue here that gets buried under the fear that so many politicians and media-types have of seeming to be out of touch with the so-called American heartland.
The simple fact is that an armed citizenry is not the basis for our freedoms. Our freedoms rest on a moral consensus, enshrined in law, that in a democratic republic we work out our differences through reasoned, and sometimes raucous, argument. Free elections and open debate are not rooted in violence or the threat of violence. They are precisely the alternative to violence, and guns have no place in them.
Dionne’s portrayal of democratic governance is both right and wrong. Read more
More on Michael Vick
The New York Times blog The Conversation has a thought provoking piece by Gail Collins and Ross Douthat about our attitudes towards Michael Vick. Collins mentions that while Michael Vick’s actions were certainly deplorable, we are less concerned over cruelty towards other types of animals. Read more
International relations theory and zombies
We missed this yesterday, but Daniel Drezner asks how international relations theory would respond to a zombie attack.
–Sam
Is politics the problem?
Writing over at The Daily Dish, Peter Suderman calls the morass over healthcare an inevitable “feature of democratic politics.” His solution?
Given my libertarian streak, I’d also add a final thought: The way to avoid the maddening convulsions of politics isn’t to change them, or rise above them, or move past them, or transform them, or whatever the trendy term of art is on any given day. It’s to avoid them — and reduce their power to hold sway over how we live. And the more decisions about our lives and welfare we put in the hands of politicians, the harder that will be to do.
Eventually, this argument goes one place: reduce the power and purview of the state. What I think Suderman is missing is that limiting state power doesn’t make politics less democratic–it makes them more so. Why will people angle any less for advantage, or shout irrationally or “convulse” if left to sort decisions out privately, rather than publicly (and for themselves, rather than through others)?
–Sam
High time for a change?
The philosophy behind the arguments for legalizing drugs
In The Washington Post, Peter Moskos and Neil Franklin argue for the legalization of all drugs, explaining that the consequences of keeping drugs illegal far outweigh the benefits. Any argument for the decriminalization of drugs, like the one presented in the aforementioned article, will appeal to at least one of two philosophical principles. Read more
Not public philosophy, but fun anyway…
I just came across The Moral of the Story blog at The New York Times, where weekly “Ethicist” column writer Randy Cohen applies an ethical lens to the news. Cohen tends to write more on personal ethics and morality than public or political philosophy, but his blog and columns are quite fun to read.
-Marc
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