In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm outlines his idea of freedom in healthcare:
Republicans need a strategy that is easy to understand, broadly popular and difficult to oppose. It must unite Republicans and divide congressional Democrats, while empowering Republican governors and legislators to resist administration pressure. I believe that strategy is what I would call “the freedom option.†Every American should have the right to decide not to participate in ObamaCare: If you like ObamaCare and its subsidies, you can keep it. If you don’t, you are free to buy the health insurance that fits your needs.
The freedom option would fulfill the commitment the president made over and over again about ObamaCare: If you like your health insurance you can keep it. If Republicans crafted a simple bill that guarantees the right of individuals and businesses to opt out of ObamaCare, buy the health insurance they choose from any willing seller (with risk pools completely separate from ObamaCare), millions of Americans would rejoice and exercise this freedom. Such a proposal would be easy for Republicans to articulate and defend. And it would be very difficult for Democrats to attack.
The dictionary definition of “freedom” is “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action”. Does Sen. Gramm’s usage conform to that definition or does it seem oddly one-dimensional to you as it does to me? His “freedom option” would be broadly constrained by the myriad of laws governing insurance not to mention by financial necessity. It also does not seem to include those who don’t care to purchase insurance at all.
There is an inevitable and inherent problem when you attempt to apply the concept of liberty interests to goods or services that are intrinsically rivalrous (one person can consume the good or service without reducing its availability to another) and exclusive (people can be excluded). They operate within the requirements of supply and demand and someone must pay for them.
In a true “freedom option” there would be no restrictions of any kind over who could provide healthcare insurance, goods, or services or over what you could purchase or from whom if you had the money. We used to have such a system and our present system evolved over the period of the last century because of the serious problems posed by it. I don’t think that very many people really want to return to such a system.
What I think they want is to be able to consume as much as they care to without paying for it on the consumer end of the equation and to be able to maintain a high and ever-rising standard of living on the producer side. That would be free not only from coercion but from the constraints of the laws of economics, mathematics, and physics. It is a fantasy.
Inherent in true freedom is taking on responsibly for one’s self, whether that involves positive outcomes or bitter pills. People, though, have simply ‘evolved’ to wanting the goodies, while leaving the grunt work of supplying them to the vagary of “someone else.”
Few people want true freedom. What most people want is enough freedom to do what they want and enough rules to keep from bearing their responsibilities. There are places on this planet where you will find real free-markets at work with no regulations, but you will find few Americans who yearn for a free-market with few regulations moving there.
The reason is simple. These places lack the government intervention they decry, and they are not willing to accept the personal responsibility for taking care of their family and property. They will stay put and complain about the horrible conditions they must endure while benefiting from them.
Dave,
I agree it’s one dimensional, but not oddly so considering the source and the target audience. This idea of Sen. Gramm’s is just another in a long line of stupid tactical ploys designed to gain partisan advantage and little else.