Free Health Care?

It's hard to understand how this term "Free Health Care" can be repeated so many times in the course of a week. It doesn't make any sense. There is no such thing, and never will be. At best, we are simply discussing the concept of shifting the payment of services to someone else -- but that doesn't make anything FREE!

Let's start with all those insidious television ads for motorized wheelchairs. When my kids annoy me for being so lazy, I ask them if they want one so they won't have to walk anymore, ever. But the big selling point for these chairs is the 'no cost to you' promise. They are mincing at words, and in doing so only help to make my point. These ads appeal to the notion of getting whatever you want at someone else's expense, whoever that might be. These chairs are not free. Someone bought the materials to make the chairs from someone, and paid some other people to assemble the parts. The assembly workers aren't willing to work for free, because they need to pay their mortgages and feed their families. These chairs don't deliver themselves, so the delivery people are going to expect to be paid for their labors, too. So, since these chairs aren't ever going to come into this world without someone paying someone for their services and for the parts and for the people who produced the parts and so on, and the television commercials are going to have costs, too, for the actors and the air-time and so forth; in short, these chairs are going to cost someone something. To offer them to me at no cost means that someone has to pay for those costs, and if not me, then who?

Similarly, for me to demand that a doctor see me for free, I would have to be suggesting that the doctor should volunteer his time. Moreover, even if the doctor did not wish to support his family or pay his own mortgage, someone would still have to pay for the facilities at the clinic. Someone would have to pay the electrical utility that furnished the power to run the lights and the sophisticated medical equipment. And what about that medical equipment? It could no more magically appear in the clinic than the power wheelchairs can arrive at someone's door without charge.

So we come back to the idea that there is no free lunch. There is no free wheelchair. There is no free health care. There is only the idea of a third party payer.

Try this experiment in democracy: take a classroom of 20 college students. Most of them are broke. I certainly was when I was a student. Now suppose it is discovered that one of them has $20 in his/her pocket. Ask the class to vote whether or not it would be fair to take that $20 away from the rich student and distributed to all equitably at $1 per person, and the vote will most likely be somewhere right around 19 in favor to one opposed. The one vote opposing will be the selfish one who would have to forfeit the $20 to this social experiment.

But I don't think it is selfish or unfair to want to keep one's own wages. I had some pretty thankless job in my day, and particularly while I was a student. I have to ask whether or not I would have been willing to do my job if I knew that I was going to forfeit my earnings to be redistributed among my classmates because they wished it, we voted for it, and I was voted down. I worked and expected to get paid because I needed the money for my own selfish needs; like paying the rent on my pathetic apartment, buying exorbitantly expensive textbooks, and trying to find things to eat occasionally.

So it seems to me that, before we all hail the concept of going to the doctor but not paying our own doctor bills, we need to take a look at who will be paying. Someone is going to have to pay. If we are piling up debt for our grandchildren, simply because we voted it that way, perhaps this isn't such a good idea. We can vote to award ourselves these great "free" benefits, but someone will have to pay for it. It won't be FAIR to the folks who have to pay, whoever they might be.