Aug 01, 2007
An Immoral Philosophy
The debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip) — whether to continue it, and for how much money and how many kids — is providing a clear view into the ugliness of anti-government conservatism. Nobody contends that the program isn’t successfully providing much needed care to millions of children, or that providing the care via SCHIP is less expensive for the nation than having all of these uninsured children show up at emergency rooms when sick.
But Mr. Bush, with the blessings of many Republicans, promises to veto any legislation that attempts to expand the program. Not because we can’t afford it: the proposed expansions would amount to a couple months of the war in Iraq, and would be paid for by taxes on tobacco. No, Bush’s real objection is that if we do this, and it works, then we’ve opened the door to more government healthcare:
And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.
This sounds like a caricature, but it isn’t. The truth is that this good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition to health care reform. Thus back in 1994, William Kristol warned against passage of the Clinton health care plan “in any form,” because “its success would signal the rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment that such policy is being perceived as a failure in other areas.”
But it has taken the fight over children’s health insurance to bring the perversity of this philosophy fully into view.
There are arguments you can make against programs, like Social Security, that provide a safety net for adults. I can respect those arguments, even though I disagree. But denying basic health care to children whose parents lack the means to pay for it, simply because you’re afraid that success in insuring children might put big government in a good light, is just morally wrong
So, we will go on with our ridiculously bad healthcare system, refusing simple changes that have worked for so many other nations, because the men running our government are committed to proving that government can’t do anything right. Which explains the missing WMD, the bungled occupation, Katrina, and so on. Those who voted for Bush can hardly be surprised at the gross levels of criminal incompetence — it was the bottom line of his “government sucks” philosophy.
