The Left Wins the Debate on Health Care in the US

Published at 08:23 on 4 February 2015

The latest Republican effort to repeal it proves my point. It contains a provision to work on coming up with something to replace it. From that article:

Unlike previous GOP bills to repeal the health care law, this version did instruct key House committees to report back within six months with new legislation that would provide health care coverage without increased costs.

The debate on whether there should be some social responsibility for health care (as opposed to it merely being each to his own in a capitalist market) is therefore over. Both sides now agree that health care should be more than just an individual responsibility. The debate is now moving on to how exactly to define that social responsibility and its relationship to individual responsibility.

The latter, of course, will always be a big part of the equation, as it must in any free society. It would take an Orwellian world of total surveillance and total lack of personal privacy for it to be otherwise.

Even in the UK, which probably has the most socialized medical system in the First World, there’s still a lot of individual responsibility: choosing which risky behaviors to engage in (or avoid), adopting good hygiene habits, reporting symptoms to one’s doctor, choosing which doctor to have as one’s primary care practitioner, etc.

But I digress. Back to the emerging consensus as to the coming parameters of the debate: It is precisely why the Right fought any sort of health-care reform so tenaciously. They knew it would come to this; they knew it would be a Social Security moment, a time when a move to a more collective responsibility for something (then: retirement, now: health care) would become widely accepted by society.

That’s true despite any of the very real flaws in Obamacare (it’s basically a welfare program for the wasteful and inefficient private insurance industry), or no doubt in any of the GOP proposals that emerge to change or replace it. The basic parameters of the debate have now shifted.

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