Is it even possible to guarantee a right to health care?
Most of the debate over health care in the U.S. — especially when a “national health care system” is brought up — is about whether some policy or another would “guarantee” that everyone would get the health care they “need.”
Keith Devens has a “thought experiment” that shows that it may not even be possible to get everybody what they need:
What you have is a spectrum. All the way on the left side of the spectrum is the case where there is no illness, and the health care cost per individual is zero. All the way on the right side of the spectrum is the case where everybody has cancer and each person needs millions of dollars worth of medical treatment. Call the former ‘A’ and the latter ‘B’. If the world was like A then the government could clearly meet all of our health care costs with no additional outlay. If the world was like B clearly the government could never provide everybody’s health care.
This thought experiment is merely intended to show that it is not a foregone conclusion that it is even possible to provide every individual with the medical care he needs period, no matter who pays for it.
Furthermore, this assumes not only that the government actually knows how to provide health care, but that we know what health care is. If health care is provided for free by the government, people will try to define it to include as much as possible. (Eyeglasses? Toothpaste? Food? Water? Shelter? Gosh, you’d die without food and shelter, so they must be “health care” too!)
May 14th, 2005 at 11:22 am
Not to be a wet blanket, but the ‘everyone has cancer’ thought experiment is really stupid. Sure, gvt. health care wouldn’t mean much if everyone had cancer. It also wouldn’t mean much if a giant asteroid hit earth, or if cars came to life and started eating everyone. Those things probably won’t happen, though.
May 15th, 2005 at 11:58 pm
jpe, you seem to miss the point of a thought experiment. Why not complain that the “no one is sick” side of the spectrum is “really stupid” as well? The point is that the actual state of health of the population is somewhere in the middle, but we don’t know where. What’s “really stupid” is for the government to promise to provide everyone with health care (which the author of this blog correctly points out is ill-defined) with no guarantee of whether that goal is even possible to meet.
P.S. While posting this comment, I didn’t include my e-mail address at first, and was given an error message. When I hit ‘back’, the form was blank, and the only way for me to recover my comment was to capture reloading the POST with Ethereal. I suppose that’s a WordPress problem. Maybe you should think about upgrading to the latest version (which I presume fixes the problem).
May 17th, 2005 at 1:45 am
Right. The point is not that everyone will actually get cancer. The point is, there is no realistic upper limit on the amount of health care that people might use. Even if everyone just wanted to be screened for every disease that can be detected on a blood test, there is not enough money in the U.S. economy to pay for it. Yet clearly, this would have a value greater than zero to a huge number of people. If health care were free to every potential patient, demand for health care could exceed the entire amount of economic output of the country.