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It's hard to respond to Andrew Sullivan on health care because his points are getting increasingly idiosyncratic: Andrew is not saying the British gets worse care, and he's not saying they are more likely to die from heart disease or kidney failure, and he's not saying they spend more, and he's expressly denying the relevance of survey evidence, so there's nothing really falsifiable about his argument. Instead, Andrew thinks Americans would hate the National Health Service. Well, maybe, maybe not. I've had friends who lived in Britain and loved it, and friends who didn't. And honestly, I don't even know what to say about his conclusion:
It was one of my first epiphanies about most Americans: they believe in demanding and expecting the best from healthcare, not enduring and surviving the worst, because it is their collective obligation. Ah, I thought. This is how free people think and act. Which, for much of the left, is, of course, the problem.Yep, that's definitely my problem: I just really hate freedom of thought and liberty in action. Meanwhile, the correct question is not whether Americans would want the National Health Service. The question is whether they'd want the National Health Service and a $4,000 check every year. 10 years under the British health system, and Americans would have an extra $40,000 per person (more if you account for inflation and spending growth). That's the choice. The British choose a more restrictive health care system -- and yes, the word is choose, they could vote to dismantle it, or fund it differently -- because that gives them a cheaper health care system. And I'm much less certain than Andrew that my countrymen have made some sort of explicit decision to demand the right to pay $4,000 more than the British for care that is not measurably better.
