A Healthier America Within Reach

In my district, we threw out our old Congresscritter, Republican Sue Kelly, and replaced her with Democrat John Hall, a singer/songwriter by trade. One of Hall’s positions is that the federal government should provide universal health care. This didn’t inspire me to vote for him. I voted for him just to punish the GOP, and I would have voted for an inanimate carbon rod if it had been on the ballot as a Democrat.

Frankly, I’m against taking money from people by force in order to provide some benefit or other, but if my money is going to be stolen anyway, I would rather some good came out of it than for it to be squandered on a program that doesn’t work or that lines the pockets of bureaucrats more than it helps ordinary folks. That’s why I reckon that any plan to provide health care should start out small with pilot programs and the like to see what might work best.

For example, let’s start by paying for prenatal care for all pregnant women. This program might actually pay for itself in the long run if problems with low birth weight and the like can be addressed early. If healthier babies result, these children will be both lower maintenance and more productive. This modest program might actually have a chance to work if it is kept simple. You can run it through Medicaid or Medicare, so you don’t need a new bureaucracy.

If the prenatal pilot program runs well, then we could consider paying for health care for babies up to a year old. This time in a human’s development is so critical that the payoff can be expected to be enormous. In fact, it’s probably more beneficial to society than paying for retired people’s care as we do now. Presumably, this is because babies don’t vote and don’t have their equivalent of an AARP.

All along the way, we will be able to work out the kinks in the program and experiment with ways to provide the care. If the program works, it can be expanded to take in older children and eventually adults. Go slow. That’s the conservative approach I advocate.

Of course, once we are providing health care to everyone, it will become the business of the state to promote healthy lifestyles and to prohibit unhealthy and risky behavior by recipients of federal health care payments. The feds will have to monitor our caloric intake and make certain that each of us is eating sensibly and exercising, safely of course. Each of us will ultimately have a federal health system caseworker (one for every hundred American households) responsible for checking up on us and nagging us about our health. Eventually, they will be armed with the authority to compel compliance with health system directives and guidelines. Our fellow citizens will be encouraged to inform on any of us who do not make it to the gym regularly or who hit the smorgasbord a little too hard. Holidays will be especially busy for the “healthies” as they will be on constant pie alert.

That’s the dream anyway.