A Single Payer System Ruled by Social Justice

I read a sob story about a parent whose child had hemophilia. The article told how an evil insurance company had been paying out $750,000 a year, but had been raising rates on everyone, causing hardships for the companies holding the insurance. Even worse, the parents were rapidly approaching the six million dollar maximum payout of the policy.

The article ended with the suggestion that single payer system ruled by social justice would magically solve the problem of diseases that consume all the available resources of a community.

The left appears to be afflicted with a blind faith that the moment everyone is forced into a single pool, a bunch of money would magically appear and that money would cure death and make the world smell of roses.

Now the one great drawback of the Medical Savings and Loan is that it is incapable of handling medical bills in the millions.

The system simply gives people direct control of their resources. On a whole, giving people direct control over their resources would have people living longer, healthier lives. The system would create a paradigm where life expectancy increased and the quality of life would improve dramatically.

The system would fall flat in handling a $10 million dollar childhood disease.

My plans set an upper limit on the loan amounts and had people buying catastrophic insurance. Unfortunately, such catastrophic insurance is ridiculously expensive.

To tell you the truth, if I had a problem that entailed a million dollar bucks in medical expenses, I would refuse the care. I would refuse the care even if I had the million dollars in the bank. I would rather have the money go to something worthwhile … like scholarships, mosquito nets in third world countries or a donation to an art gallery.

Anyway, I had been sitting here feeling like the evil caricature that Representative Alan Grayson warned you about … you know the evil Republican who would rather see the kid die than spend the $10 million or so needed to keep the kid alive.

So, I had been in the funk for most of the weekend until I started watching a progressive on Book TV ranting about social justice. It was just your standard rant about how 10% of the people on the planet seem to be consuming 90% of the resources.

I've been in a funk because neither insurance nor a medical savings and loan is able to handle multimillion dollar childhood diseases.

However, it struck me that a single payer system ruled by social justice wouldn't cover such an ailment either.

The multimillion dollar cases where five percent of the patients consume 95 percent of the health resources would be declared socially unjust.

Despite the slogan "from each according to their ability and to each according to their needs," the socialist system which is supposed to provide perfect care for all catastrophic and chronic conditions is not going to do so. Any parent demanding such state of the care would be barked into submission and struggled against as bourgeoisie.

The free market is unable to provide state or the art care for all patients because such is not a best use of resources.

A single payer system ruled by social justice would make similar rationing decisions.

The only difference between the systems is that the free market provides better care for more people than a socialist system, but that socialism silences dissent, so no-one hears of the suffering.

Socialism lacks internal consistency. Claims that socialized medicine would provide state of the art care to all directly violates the concept of social justice which lambasts anyone who consumes more than their fair share of the resources.