CATO's Tim Lee has been running a very good blog named Binary Bits which seems, in large part, dedicated to correcting Matt, myself, and a few others on our health care posts. Oftentimes, Tim is right and I am wrong. But today he wrote a long post, in response to me, which lets me be right and him wrong (and they say liberals are wishy-washy), so let's get to it.
Tim argues that universal health care, and indeed health care, is nothing more than an effort to redistribute money from the healthy to the sick. And he's right, I guess; that is one way of looking at it. But what society is aiming at isn't a redistribution, but a guarantee: it's promising that if you get extremely, expensively sick, the illness will not bankrupt you and funds will be available to cover your treatment. In this way it doesn't deserve to be grouped in with more commonly discussed forms of redistribution, say from rich to poor or, under Bush, from poor to rich, because it's redistributing to a group we all expect to be part of one day. That's kinda the thing about health insurance, in fact. We all believe that, sooner or later, we'll be the ones on the receiving end of the redistribution, and when that day comes, having paid for others up till now is going to seem like quite a good deal.
That's why, contra-Tim, it does make sense for a middle class person who breaks his arm to have others pay for it. The middle class doesn't constantly break their arms. And indeed, the middle class doesn't always want to spend enormous amounts of money on medical coverage, particularly when the stocks aren't doing well and low consumer spending is cutting back on commissions. So the middle class, like the rest of us, enters into a compact designed to reduce their risk. It's not moral, it's not a deep-seated belief that the sick deserve more money than the well, it's a practical judgment about what will benefit them most.
