The Coronavirus Pandemic ultimately represents the biggest failure of central planning in our generation. So, doubling down on a central planning model of healthcare might just be the wrong approach.
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In the face of an unprecedented global pandemic whose current impact landed heaviest upon the United States, many Democrats contend we at last need to recognize the need for a universal government-run healthcare program such as Medicare for All. Many explain how Medicare for All could have reduced the strain on our healthcare system and anxieties within American homes. This belief will be a rallying cry whose volume will only increase in the coming months as we approach the November elections. But is this the lesson we should take from the global pandemic?
Currently, Medicare for All is primarily only a political slogan. Democrats who embraced the slogan offered scant details to explain how it would be managed or paid for, so they never really presented a real policy. Medicare for All was a plan Bernie Sanders initially put forth several years ago. By the halfway point of the 2020 primaries, it was evident the idea was now mainstream within Democratic politics.
Essentially, Medicare for All suggests a government-managed program where every American (and non-American resident) has healthcare. And, that the government will pay for the “right” to personal healthcare through taxes, instead of the doctor’s office. For those included among lower-income brackets, presumably, healthcare would be free while the bulk of the burden to pay for the national needs would fall on the wealthy and likely the upper-middle class.
The case made by proponents of Medicare for All essentially suggests it is a moral requirement that the world’s wealthiest country provide healthcare to its citizens, specifically those who cannot afford it. In light of the trillion-dollar budget deficit that preceded the pandemic and the massive government bailouts that followed, it is difficult to justify opposition to Medicare for All based on sound fiscal principles alone. It may be a long time before opposition to any program based on sound fiscal policy can be perceived as an honest position again.
But let’s consider the idea of Medicare for All from the perspective of mere common sense.
Before the pandemic, the dubious prospect of entrusting America’s healthcare to the same leaders and representatives that gave us the Department of Motor Vehicles and Social Security was a hard sell. Have you ever met an American who held greater faith in their government (or their fellow man for that matter) after visiting the DMV? How many decades have the problems of Social Security been recognized but unaddressed due to political gridlock, corruption, and power-plays in Washington DC?
Do we now want these same institutions and individuals to handle cancer and heart disease? American culture and governing seemed specifically nonaligned to the standards and values necessary to make a government-run universal healthcare plan work.
Then came the pandemic crisis.
As US unemployment numbers soared past 20 million in the last month, millions of those impacted Americans found it nearly impossible to apply for their benefits from the government unemployment insurance program. The bulky bureaucracy of the US government presented itself as completely unprepared and incapable of assisting in the crisis that was slamming individual lives. Web sites crashed. Phones went unanswered. People required by law to social distance found themselves standing in packed lines to apply for their rightful benefits.
Is this the same governing system we want running a universal health care plan that is both mandatory and unaccountable to any market competition?
The bungling of the federal government’s response to the pandemic seems a clear warning sign that its institutions do not represent a reasonable pathway for efficient, effective, and innovative healthcare. Setting aside the high-profile incompetence represented by President Trump, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention itself was slow to respond to the pandemic crisis because the organization was confronting an internal contamination.
The deficiencies of the US government’s response to this unprecedented healthcare emergency go beyond the unique nature of a crisis event. The crisis revealed the fundamental flaws and quality of the American government system.
It is a bulky system weighed down by bureaucracy that slogs forward only through a maze of checks and balances. Indeed, the most calming moments of the coronavirus crisis have been when political leaders stepped aside and allowed business leaders to step up. Americans have learned to place greater trust in Walmart and Walgreens than the President and the Congress when it comes to confronting the pandemic.
The inherent slowness of America’s system of government is by design. It is one of the safety measures meant to guard American democracy from excess and dictatorial influences. While such a system may work well to increase the duration and prosperity of a national government, it is not conducive to healthcare. The safety and healthcare of individual lives require a system built upon speed, efficiency, innovation, and flexibility.
The global pandemic has revealed that the incompatibility of central governments and healthcare systems is universal and not only an American phenomenon. One of the lessons of the pandemic is that we do not need to increase central government-run healthcare. We need to move in the other direction. No healthcare system could withstand the level of crisis presented by the pandemic without appearing weak. But, centralized government-run healthcare systems around the world actually made the problems worse.
In China, for example, the centralized nature of the government-run healthcare system operated to deliberately cover up the growth and spread of the virus locally during the early weeks when the coronavirus was first observed.
After China failed in the 2002 SARS outbreak, they put in place a system to prevent such failures from ever happening again deliberately. As the coronavirus began to appear in Wuhan hospitals in December 2019, local officials and hospital administrators withheld information from central authorities to delay or divert negative reports to their political overseers.
According to a report in the New York Times, government leaders in Beijing first learned of the virus from whistle-blowers, not from the predesigned communication channels of the centrally planned government healthcare system. Even after that point, misinformation persisted as confirmed case counts were kept artificially low to protect political profiles. The political motives within a government-run healthcare system prevented a proper response to the crisis in the early stages when it could have been most effectively confronted.
Because the tentacles of a federal government rely upon politics for its operations, failures and missteps are far more effective in prodding such a system forward rather than positive actions to the needs of its constituents. In other words, embarrassments and crises are more likely to bring about change from bureaucrats than a desire to meet the unique needs of individual American lives and families. Whether that is right or wrong is a separate discussion, but it is not the standards that should drive our healthcare system.
Medicare for All is the latest name given to a formula for healthcare where the needs of the individual become lost in the paperwork of politicized bureaucrats. It is not the answer for America. The failures of the American government in the pandemic should prove this.
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