Last time I pointed to an important dissimilarity between health care and the rest of the marketplace, and this week I want to argue for another important difference. The concern of the capitalist, which I share, is that when people don’t own something, they tend to neglect it in a way that they would not if it were privately owned. Two cheesy, overused, and yet accurate examples: 1) we all know what happens when you get behind the wheel of a rental car. While you don’t trash it, you are harder on a rental car than your personal car, because you are not going to have to deal with the long term consequences of a rental car that needs repaired, and somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that. 2) If you are a homeowner, you know the amazing amount of work and care that you put into to getting your home to look nice and last as long as possible. When it’s your property, you know that its value will drop if not cared for properly, and so you go the ‘extra mile.’
Socialists, of course, advocate a society in which the government owns everything. In this ideal society, there would be no private property, which would mean that there would be complete equality. When Raul Castro took over for his brother recently, he lifted the long-standing ban on cell phones. Why did Fidel ban cell phones? Because if some people had cell phones and some did not, that would make society unequal. I hold the same line of reasoning that all people from capitalist societies hold: great idea, doesn’t seem very practical. I am a liberal, but I am not a socialist – I think private property, in most situations, is a good thing for the reasons that are underlying those two previous examples. Even the best of us just don’t treat things with the same level of care when we are not dealing with our own property.
So what about ‘socialized medicine?’ If we reject socialism, shouldn’t we also be opposed to socialized medicine, where health care and insurance is totally controlled and paid for by the government? Conservatives, it seems, make this association. After all, they may reason, if you are the one who has to pay for your broken foot, you will careful to put on work boots when you’re working with heavy machinery. But if the government pays for whatever maladies you develop, you will tend to be less careful with your own health. The government just “bails you out” of whatever situation you got yourself into. This, I think, is part of why conservatives get their pitchforks when they hear about government-sponsored health care.
But this reasoning doesn’t hold. I agree with the conservative that we should not let the government own, for example, houses. But I predict that the smoking rate, for example, will not go up if health care is free. Conservatives are afraid of a government bale out system, where people will just start lighting up and let the government pay for their lung surgery later on in life. My prediction is that something like this will not happen. Unlike a dilapidated house, which I can just walk away from and let it be the government’s problem, I cannot walk away from my body. My health is already something I care very much about (or else someone already doesn’t really care – like the chain smoker). Those of us who don’t think that socialism can be as effective as capitalism agree that people, because of their nature, need some kind of incentive to take care of something. That is true for my house, but I don’t need an extra incentive to take care of my health. This is yet another important dissimilarity between socialized medicine and anything else the government might control, and yet another reason to think more critically about how we could institute ‘socialized medicine’ in a healthy, creative way in our capitalistic society.
