Bill Maher, Ronald Dworkin, And The Real Health Care Debate

Bill Maher and Ronald Dworkin’s recent essays on Obamacare probably best illustrated where the real ideological positions are staked out: from the Left, Maher, whose main contention is that health care is a “service[/]institution[s] so vital to our nation” that it should be “exempt from market pressures” [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-not-everything-i_b_244050.html], and from the Right, Dworkin, whose counter-contention is that the resulting system of public medicine would be about as efficient as the public school system
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574358281875211014.html].

Both are correct. And in this case, both are being equally hypocritical. To a certain point, each author’s respective thesis [at least, as I read them] serves to illustrate the point at which each one’s respective counterpart would be forced to think contradictory. {I’m sure they didn’t do this deliberately, but no matter.]

Maher’s point about removing the profit motive from health care exposes contradictions in the conservative arguments regarding lasseiz-faire, lessened governmental interference in personal affairs, and the concomitant “threat” of triage conducted by panels using progressive tenets as guidelines. Conservatives don’t want government interfering in their health care decisions? Sure; just ask Terri Schiavo or anyone with an unwanted pregnancy. Or, ask former Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who signed the 1999 Texas Futile Care Law, allowing health care workers to remove expensive life support for terminally ill patients if the patient or family is unable to pay the medical bills: a clear case of an economics-driven “death panel”.

Similarly, albeit from the opposite ideological direction, Dworkin’s public school analog is even more apt than he realizes, as it helps put the lie to the notion that health care, like the schools, will become a truly effectively administered public good if the profit motive is removed. Instead, it will be driven by various competing interest groups—particularly, unions—who will have a stake in ensuring the diversion of resources toward themselves and away from the people who need it: in the case of the schools, the children always come last; in the case of health care, the patients will. One system of “profiteering” will simply be replaced by another.

In the end, these two pundits clearly indicate that the health care imbroglio is really about anything but health care, per se; rather, it’s about how various pieces of the pie are to be distributed [or, re-distributed]. This is the main reason that, no matter how much effort Obama and the rest of the far left expends in “drag[ging] them to it” [Maher’s comment in another forum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lBgpI2S4I4], “it”—healthcare—will never become the moral issue the left wants it to become, namely with a moral gravitas comparable to the abolition and civil rights movements, when “dragging” was called for.

The health care “debate”, then, is just an old-fashioned feeding frenzy in…drag.