Senator Bernie Sanders (Loonbag-VT) has been the leading voice in the United States for socialized health care. His call for such policy amounts to this tweet he issued last night:
People who can’t afford health care do not deserve to die.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 26, 2017
This, of course, has nothing to do with policy, and everything to do with an immature worldview that suggests that government can tame every unfairness in life. Of course no one deserves to die because they cannot afford health care. But no one deserves to die for any reason other than their own evil criminality. People don’t deserve to die of cancer. People don’t deserve to die in car accidents. People don’t deserve to die peacefully in their beds in old age.
As Clint Eastwood says in Unforgiven, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
The question in public policy isn’t one of motivation — nobody, Right or Left, believes that poor and sick people deserve to die. The question is how to best increase access to health care. The Right believes that increase in supply is necessary in order to create competition and therefore lower cost and increase quality; that means deregulation. The Left believes that current supply must be redistributed. One of these views, in every single area of life, has generated more access to wealth and health; one of these views has generated less. If there is a question of morality attendant to health care, it isn’t whether people deserve death based on cost, but whether health care providers can be forced to serve people at a loss, and whether doing so will help more patients in the long run.
But Sanders’ simplistic kindergarten sloganeering convinces those who refuse to acknowledge the decent intentions of their ideological opponents. It’s not designed to achieve better health care; it’s designed to slander those who disagree about the method for achieving better health care without violating the rights of others.