Responding to Charlie Sprague's Misguided Views on Healthcare

Socialized medicine would make the doll wait in line.

Charlie Sprague CMC '10 often gives me a great opportunity to explain and elucidate just how out to pasture the Far Left is. Sprague's columns on The Forum are like reading the tea leaves of what established Far Left opinion is and will be.

In the past, I have shown that his views on racialist preferences obscure the facts about affirmative action and how he promotes eugenics.

Today, I'm happy to expound upon how he's wrong about health care. Sprague, like most of the Far Left, believes health care is a right and that it therefore needs to be provided by the government. We know, though, through examining other nations that be rationed by government fiat.

As always, it's good to get your bias out of the way. I confess to having strong emotions on the topic of health care as I am convinced that my mother would not be with us today were it not for the breakthroughs of the American, driven by our for profit system, given the rationing of care that exists in socialized systems. Growing up, the spectre of my mother's breast cancer lingered over my family and a lot of my thoughts. Truth be told, I still fear its return and return it has. When I was 17, my mother was "re-diagnosed" with it.

Fortunately, American women with breast cancer, and other cancers, consistently have better health care outcomes than their European and Canadian counterparts. As I pointed out in the comment section of Sprague's post, the real question is survivability and here the U.S. has Europe beat.

"Survival was significantly higher in the United States for all solid tumors, except testicular, stomach, and soft-tissue cancer, the authors report. The greatest differences were seen in the major cancer sites: colon and rectum (56.2% in Europe vs 65.5% in the United States), breast (79.0% vs 90.1%), and prostate cancer (77.5% vs 99.3%), and this “probably represents differences in the timeliness of diagnosis,” they comment. That in turn stems from the more intensive screening for cancer carried out in the United States, where a reported 70% of women aged 50 to 70 years have undergone a mammogram in the past 2 years, one-third of people have had sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy in the past 5 years, and more than 80% of men aged 65 years or more have had a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test. In fact, it is this PSA testing that probably accounts for the very high survival from prostate cancer seen in the United States, the authors comment.” [Emphasis added]

In short, we catch more cancers because we don't ration care and have long waiting lines. If you have to wait on average 20 hours in Ottawa for care, it tends to create disincentives for staying to get treated. In the U.S., that wait time is a little over an hour in our emergency rooms and yes, we treat everyone in our emergency rooms.

This most recent op-ed by Dr. David Gratzer explodes some of the fallacies that Sprague and others have argued in the comment section in a piece that ran in City Journal. It turns out that the whole notion that the U.S. spends too much on health care is foolish.

Officially, the logic is this: the larger health care’s share of the economy, the higher the per-unit cost of care to the government, to employers, and to you. In Canada, for instance, health care is just 10 percent of GDP. Further, our northern neighbor covers almost every citizen and we don’t. The U.S., then, seems to be paying far more to insure a smaller share of its population—to be paying more for less.

There are several flaws in this reasoning, first and foremost its claim that a dollar spent is a dollar wasted. America’s health-care sector is larger partly because, unlike Canada’s, it includes for-profit corporations. Consider the benefit: companies invest billions each year developing innovative, life-saving drugs and devices. Are these expenses really something to lament? Similarly, is it a disadvantage that the U.S. has 11 percent more practicing doctors per capita than Canada? Or 15 percent more nurses? Is it a problem that the United States has almost four times as many MRI scanners per capita as Canada does, or that we preventively test more of our population for common cancers? Hardly. The fact that America’s health-care system is larger, more advanced, and better staffed than a system with rationed care is an advantage. To pretend otherwise is just a tactic to make the reform pill easier to swallow.

So the American health sector doesn’t have to shrink. But it should certainly deliver care at a lower unit price. To see how, let’s stop comparing our health care with what’s available in Canada or Sweden or Mars and instead make some comparisons among various Americanhealth-care systems. Take two very different states: Wisconsin and New York. In Wisconsin, a family can buy a health-insurance plan for as little as $3,000 a year. The price for a basic family plan in the Empire State: $12,000. The stark difference has nothing to do with each state’s health sector as a share of its economy (14.8 percent in Wisconsin as of 2004, the most recent year for which data are available, and 13.9 percent in New York). Rather, the difference has to do with how each state’s insurance pools are regulated. In New York State, politicians have tried to run the health-insurance system from Albany, forcing insurers to deliver complex Cadillac plans to every subscriber for political reasons, driving up costs. Wisconsin’s insurers are far freer to sell plans at prices consumers want.

The gulf in insurance-premium prices among American states is a sign that too much government intervention—not too little—is what’s distorting prices from one market to the next. The key to reducing health-care costs for patients, then, is to promote competition, not to dictate insurance requirements from on high. Unfortunately, a government-run insurance plan is the core of ObamaCare.

Forum Features My Article on Walter Cronkite's Speech Before Pomona and Legacy

Over at The Forum, I have written an article about the legacy of Walter Cronkite. Here are a few graffs from it. I'm harshly critical of Cronkite, but I don't believe unfairly. He gave the commencement speech at Pomona College in 2004.

For many, Cronkite was the embodiment of a time when the news really was “fair and balanced.” We mistake the simple comments of newspaperman and believe that there really was a time when things could be neatly boiled down into a simple evening broadcast. Somehow we’re supposed to believe that uttering the phrase, “And That’s the Way It Was,” must make everyone agree.

Don’t believe the hype. Cronkite died a crotchety old man whose politics finally shown through during the final years of his life when he went off on a speaking tour against the President. It was a fitting end for a man who was part of the Big Three – when only three networks that controlled the flow of information into our homes and thus how we lived our lives. Pundits like to trumpet Cronkite as some kind of purer Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann, who was a just-the-facts Middle America newspapermen, dontcha know. But really, the news culture of spin was just a logical extension of his cultivated public persona.

Nowhere is that politicization of information more clear than in a commencement speech at Pomona College in 2004where he looked at the coming presidential campaign between John F. Kerry and George W. Bush. (For those interested, the introduction of that speech was delivered by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor and blogger at Pomona College and well worth a read.)

Peter Robinson's Forbes Column on Harry V. Jaffa

Here's the link to the Forbes column and here's a link to some masterful commentary by Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Harry Jaffa's Affair With The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Peter Robinson, 07.17.09, 12:00 AM ET

One day in 1946, Harry Jaffa wandered into a used bookstore in Manhattan and picked up a copy of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. "I fell in love with the debates just because they were such wonderful reading," Jaffa says. Then a poor graduate student, Jaffa returned to the bookstore day after day, reading a few pages each day, before he at last scraped together the money to buy the volume.

For a dozen years, Jaffa dedicated himself to the exchanges between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, learning all he could about the men and their times. In 1959 Jaffa published Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Four hundred pages of close textual analysis, biography and political philosophy, the book transformed the scholarly understanding of Lincoln, placing the prairie lawyer on a level with Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and the other Founders.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the book's appearance, the University of Chicago Press has just published a new edition. "Crisis of the House Divided," writes Andrew Ferguson, who has also written a volume about Lincoln, "is a book that will never die--a genuine landmark in American thought. It is the greatest Lincoln book ever."

In an interview this week, Jaffa, now 91 and a fellow of the Claremont Institute, demonstrated that he still has vital things to say. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, Jaffa explained, turned on issues that were present at the very founding of western civilization--and that we must face again today.

"After awhile," Jaffa says, "I realized that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was identical to the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic. Not similar to it. Identical. It is a question of whether the people make the moral order or the moral order makes the people."

Justice, Thrasymachus argued, possesses no independent or objective standing, finding its only definition in the wishes of the powerful. "Justice," Thrasymachus asserts in the Republic, "is the advantage of the stronger." Socrates objects, insisting that reason can indeed apprehend objective standards of justice.

Likewise Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Insisting on popular sovereignty, Douglas argued that the citizens of Kansas or Nebraska could make slavery acceptable in their states simply by voting in favor of it. Lincoln considered this absurd. "Lincoln thought slavery was wrong," Jaffa explains, "and he did not think a vote of the people could make it right."

Like the Founders, Lincoln believed implicitly in an objective moral order. Today we believe in "values."

"The secretary of state, the president, they all talk about 'values,'" Jaffa says. "A 'value' is a subjective desire, not an objective truth. George Washington said, 'The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.' If you had said, 'Oh, Mr. Washington, you mean in our 'values?' Washington would have replied, 'What the hell are you talking about?'"

Our belief in "values" isn't just vacuous. It's perilous.

"Marx saw morality as the great enemy of human well-being," Jaffa says, "and now the society of the future is one in which moral distinctions based upon the Judeo-Christian and Greek tradition will dissolve. Without even knowing it, we are moving into a Communist world. Without a revolution, we are moving into the world that Marx wanted."

What is to be done? We must once again recognize the objective moral order.

"Washington spoke of 'an indissoluble union of virtue and happiness,'" Jaffa says. "Aristotle couldn’t have put it any better. And when Washington said that, he was telling us that 'the pursuit of happiness' in the Declaration of Independence didn't mean radical individualism. It meant the pursuit of virtue."

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln. All believed that morality--that goodness and justice--were not merely human constructs but real.

"We have to return to the political thought of the American founders and Abraham Lincoln," Harry Jaffa says. "Nothing is at stake but the salvation of Western civilization."

Peter Robinson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and contributor to RobinsonandLong.com, writes a weekly column for Forbes.