The Fundamental Problem With Universal Healthcare in America

Lately there has been an ungodly amount of debate regarding Obama's version of universal healthcare (lovingly dubbed "Obamacare"). Most of the hubbub has been over if people will be able to keep their own doctors, what this means for existing insurance, and if this will impact the overall quality of care. Those issues I am not going to address here. There is a more basic, fundamental issue with universal healthcare in our country.

If we lay down the political arms for a few minutes and analyze our own lifestyles and routines, we see that we all make decisions using our own free will every day. Each of these decisions has an impact on a person's overall level of health. For example, Joe chooses to eat at McDonalds for dinner every night, drink ten beers daily, and to smoke a pack every day. Now I don't do any of these things because I have a certain level of respect for myself but, when it comes down to it, Joe has the freedom to make these decisions without anyone telling him otherwise. To be quite honest, this is exactly what I believe makes America great (cliche, yes, true, yes).

Now when Joe's unhealthy decisions catch up to him, he will inevitably have to enter the health care system for some sort of procedure. In days past, Joe either had insurance to cover these costs or he paid out of pocket. The financial responsibility for Joe's poor choices were on him and him alone. Under a universal healthcare system that is funded with taxpayer money, the general public has to bear the cost of Joe's decisions.

Nothing about what I've said thus far is groundbreaking but here is the paradox. A person that is free to make their own choices their entire life but doesn't have to bear any of the responsibility for the consequences of those actions does not have much incentive to act responsibly. If we take that logic and build upon it, we find that the next course of action should be to regulate the actions one can take during their lifetime to minimize the cost of healthcare (aka cost to the government and taxpayers) later in life. In Joe's case, this means regulating his caloric intake, requiring him to exercise, mitigating his drinking, and prohibiting him smoking. This would result in Joe being less of burden on the healthcare system.

How would you feel if the government told you what to eat, when to exercise, and what to do in your spare time? How American is that?

What I fear is that, if we implement Obama's proposed healthcare plan, we, as a nation, take one of three paths: (1 like described above) we continue to regulate what a person can and cannot do based on what impact that will have on the person's health or (2) we draw the line in the sand, refuse to regulate an individual's activities, and abandon the universal healthcare system or (3) refuse to regulate an individual's activities, keep the universal system in place and it bankrupts the country.

The results of those three paths respectively are: (1) a distopian future where everything is heavily regulated (for an example of what I'm talking about read A Brave New World or 1984), (2) we end up back where we are now but after burning through a whole lot of taxpayer dollars, or (3) the unthinkable.

So if we pull ourselves away from this partisan battle over the minutia of Obama's plan and look at what the real issue is here and how it can impact our entire nation, we can see there is no positive outcome.

In a fundamentally free country, a universal healthcare system is bound for failure so you need to get rid of one or the other. So choose: a free country or a universal healthcare system. Which will it be America?