Personal story on devastating loss of health care benefits
This was a front-page story at the Wall Street Journal today. It should bring home the problem with lack of benefits in America. Also see Mark Thoma’s post yesterday on health care called "The Hottest Places in Hell are Reserved for Those Who, in Times of Moral Crisis, Maintain a Neutrality".
A link to the WSJ print story is at the bottom.
Source
Slump Spreads to Health Care as Michigan Loses Auto Jobs – WSJ
What as a libertarian would you propose to do about this? Did this crisis make you less libertarian? What do you think will happen politically?
You ask a tough question. This is something I have been thinking a lot about. My first inclination is to have a government-sponsored plan which is run by an arms length private non-profit with oversight from Congress as the public option.
That’s the Libertarian in me speaking. Yet, I continually ask myself whether health care is something that lends itself to the profit motive. Or should profit be taken out of it altogether as in police work and fire fighting? In any case, fire fighters were once private companies and so were police forces. This opened them up to corruption on what many considered basic needs of an advanced economy.
Today the question is much the same about basic coverage and catastrophic insurance. Is this a basic need that the ill effects of the profit motive makes natural for a non-profit or government to take over? I say probably.
But you already have for-profit and those vested interests are going to be difficult to deny. I hope to show the Bill Moyers clip that Thoma’s transcript highlights. The video is compelling — very compelling — regarding the idea that profit motives lead to bad outcomes in health care.