One thing that is sure to set me on a defensive path is to call something a “right” that most certainly is not.

Al Gore, since he lost his presidential bid, has become one of our nation’s most aggressive agitators. While I’m sure he isn’t abandoning the saving of the planet, I’m sure that his righteous pronouncements on progressive causes will be magnified by the magical sheen of his shiny new Nobel Peace Prize.

In a setting reminiscent of a bored college student making a video in his dorm room, Gore is shown proclaiming that healthcare in America “ought to be a matter of right,” addressing what he thinks to be an “immoral” healthcare situation.

No, sir, healthcare is not a “right”. Whether or not it is a desirable thing for our country to provide health care to the masses is an open debate. As our nation grows wealthier (and we have), it is reasonable to ask the question of how we will use that wealth to attend to public good--how much of our collective wealth are we willing to put into increased funding for education, infrastructure, and subsidized healthcare, for instance--or whether it is healthier for the economy and our society to keep that wealth in the private sector.

I think people know the direction I would be pointing, but that’s irrelevant. The truth is that every government expenditure is a balancing act; we can’t afford to do everything that everyone wants to do, nor should we try. I believe that there are some expenditures (national security, education, and infrastructure mainly--and not all of those in every situation) that are utterly necessary for the well-being of our nation. Most other things fall into the “yeah, that’s nice, but” category. As wealthy as our country is, our resources aren’t endless--even if money weren’t such a concern, there are still only so many doctors, so many nurses, so many MRI machines, and so many hospitals at our disposal.

And money is a concern. With the baby boomers now officially entering the Social Security system, our nation’s costs on entitlements are only going to increase while the pool of workers paying the bills for retirees will shrink proportionally. That means higher debt, higher taxes, or redirecting money from other areas. Bet on a mix of higher debt and higher taxes. Until we’ve managed to put together fiscally sound plans to handle our current budget problems, does it make any sense at all to even try to put in Gore’s preferred “universal single-payer government-provided or government-funded health care?”

What Gore is advocating is fiscally irresponsible--and crashing our already unbalanced (if impressively resilient) economy to satisfy some phantom “right” is insane. To pursue that end while calling our current system immoral is hypocritical: when the economy comes tumbling down, how will this new “right” be attended to?

Freedom of speech is a right. Freedom of association is a right. Freedom of religion is a right. I think you see where I’m going with this.

The government doesn’t have to spend a penny to provide those things to me (although it does spend considerable amounts preserving my opportunity to enjoy them). Health care will never and can never be equally distributed and truly universal in its coverage. Even countries that provide the kind of system that Gore prefers all practice some form of rationing and have seen secondary markets grow to attend to the needs that the government program can’t cover. Truly equitable, truly universal coverage is a myth because while free speech is boundless, health care is a limited resource. I think it’s good to understand the difference.

I’ll be happy to continue debating what health care subsidies are prudent and good for the government to provide. What I won’t do is accept that health care can ever occupy the same space as free speech and freedom of religion.

Unless, of course, this is one big misunderstanding and what Gore really meant is that health care is a right in the same way that we are guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms. That is, the government won’t buy me my H&K USP, but recognizes my right to ownership. I’m pretty sure that’s not the direction he’s traveling.

In sum: too much government spending bad, fiscal responsibility good. I put that last bit in for all the Republican leaders who might have lost their way.

Read the story.

Update: For the shorter response, read a little Steve Green. Then, for a laugh, read the “Correction” on his quickie post about Randi Rhodes unassaulted self. If Steve were a girl, his wife wouldn’t be able to trust me around the guy.

Or something like that.

Just another note about Hillary’s health care plan from Shawn Macomber (who, occasionally, pops his head up from writing his upcoming examination of global class warfare to deliver interesting commentary):

[A]fter I wrote this piece upon the unveiling of MittCare last year I was invited to appear on a Boston newscast as part of a panel of skeptics. As was made clear to me in the breathtakingly rude lectures I was subjected to both in the “green room” and on-air by my fellow guests, the left-wing saw MittCare much as I imagine they’ll see Hillary’s new plan: A necessary, hopefully short-lived Trojan horse to carry universality through the city gates and create the crisis that will send the populace into the arms of single-payer.

Read the rest.

For that matter, read this teaser on the YearlyKos event that gives us a hint of the article that will be coming up from Shawn in the October issue of American Spectator.

John Podhoretz, who seems close to ready to cede the presidential election to Hillary Clinton, notes one of her points of both growth and strength.

If you want to know why the safest bet is that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States, you need only consider the brilliant drafting of her health-care plan and the meaning of it next to her 1993 plan. The 1993 plan was intellectually honest — it was thousands of pages long because it attempted to foresee and plug any conceivable loophole in the effort to bring about universal coverage. It was positively Talmudic in that respect and therefore suffered from the weakness of all Talmudic efforts that do not involve the interpretation of a divinely inspired document — in the effort to foreclose all possible escapes, there was something bullying about it.

The 2007 plan, by contrast, is intellectually dishonest in the sense that it leaves all the managerial details to be handled later. Leaving aside profound philosophical questions, the key problem with universal health care plans is primarily that they create a managerial nightmare whose inevitable end is the creation of a system entirely controlled by federal bureaucrats — since somebody has to set enforceable terms that are constant from one town to the other, one state to the other.

The new Hillary health care plan deals with this by pretending that it can all work itself out simply by allowing people to stay with the plans they have and force those plans to cover everything. This huge increase in mandated expenses is to be covered not only by new taxes but by compelling everyone in the country and his employer to pay for health care.

That order is necessary because it will force people into the system — and there are tens of millions of them — who don’t have health care coverage because they have determined they don’t need it or can do without it. By expanding the risk pool in this way to include those who won’t actually spend any money, or will spend far less than they pay in, the system will in theory be able to sustain itself.

I think he has a point, although I think that he overestimates her chance of being elected to the office. First, health care is a big concern for most Americans, and a plan that sounds good will do much to sway voters. Her plan--not vague enough that she can be accused of offering up a plan with no substance, but not specific enough to be, as Podhoretz notes, bullying--sounds good. This isn’t the right time to get into the specific discussion of why I think her plan would be far more expensive than she suggests and is merely a stepping stone to a single payer system of socialized health care that could be disastrously ruinous to our economy, but let me acknowledge the strengths of her proposal in a political sense.

1. She’s left enough room (with individual mandates, for example) to make sure that she can still say that it isn’t a socialized system and be somewhat believable. Not accurate, from my view, but believable.
2. She’s left a loophole of illegal immigration-sized proportions, and I don’t think that was an oversight. This gives her room to suggest that the costs for illegals will not be covered by her plan or simply say that details like this will need to be discussed at a later date. Given that she will face pressure from both sides of the immigration debate, this actively sidesteps the worst of that controversy.
3. Read her lips: No new taxes. Instead, Hillary would roll back taxes on the hated rich, ask companies to pony up a portion if they decide against providing insurance directly to their employees, and remove some current government subsidies do insurance companies--this along with government leverage and “pooling” power would hold costs down to a manageable level, according to Hillary. While I believe her assumptions are flawed, her presentation of her ideas could still win converts who believe in the miraculous power of taxing others and government giving away bundles of “free” services. 

Just-vague-enough is Hillary’s friend and a politically brilliant move for someone who the political right had been hoping would roll out another thousand-page health care plan. In a practical sense, it would have been much easier to discredit a plan that looked more like her original proposal. It’s damned good politics.

I could argue against the plan and cite the dangers of the “individual mandate”, the uncontrolled costs of universal access, and the creeping move towards an even more expensive single-payer system. I could talk about the offensive intrusion of a government forcing me to buy health care insurance. None of that matters at this stage of the presidential race, though; what counts is providing answers that sound strong, are presented well, and convince enough people to come out to vote. The end result of Hillarycare 2.0 will undoubtedly look different when viewed through the lens of whatever new laws have to be passed and bureaucracies created to support the plan. But no matter how appetizing it tastes when the details are in place, this glimpse of her recipe looks awfully good now to people who are worried about their health care futures and for the companies that continue to pay hefty increases every year to the insurance companies.

The reason that I think Podhoretz is wrong about her chances in the election come down to the motivational animosity that so many voters have toward Clinton and her husband. I think that it would be insane to bet on any other Democrat candidate winning the nomination, but that nomination doesn’t win the election. Much of the election will hinge, of course, on progress in Iraq, but some of it will come down to who voters like the more they look at the final candidates. Hillary still has a lot of ill will to overcome before she can win the presidency.

None of which explains the irritation I feel whenever I hear that Budweiser commercial that reminds me of the electric violin solo in Revenge of the Nerds. Maybe that’s just me, though…

“Do you think Medicare is socialized medicine?” Clinton asked...

Yes. If, as the American Heritage Dictionary defines it, we accept “socialized” to mean “To place under government or group ownership or control”, then it would be hard to call Medicare anything other than socialized medicine. It’s tax payer funded health care for a subset of the citizenry.

I’m not sure why she would suggest that it isn’t socialized medicine, although I do understand why she would want to do so. Socialized is a dirty word to many Americans and if they think something is “socialist”, they aren’t particularly likely to support it not least because “socialized” programs tend to require tax increases. Hillary Clinton is not a dumb woman; she knows precisely what it is that any universal health care program would entail. Government mandated coverage means either government subsidies or tax credits for employers (which amount quite nearly to the same thing) and tax increases for coverage of the unemployed--and that comes along with a heavy dose of new government regulations on the health care industry.

Now, whether that is all worthwhile or not is another debate. There isn’t any room for discussing whether any true universal health care system is “socialized medicine” or not, though. It is, it will be, and to suggest otherwise is a bit of a dodge.