Bush-doctor

President Bush has announced his plan to use “market forces” and tax incentives to fix our nation’s healthcare system.

I try very hard not to just reflexively reject everything that this president says. However, with just under two years left, sometimes I think I could get away with it and nobody would notice the difference.

The president’s plan would give a tax deduction on privately purchased health insurance.

Does anybody in his administration know anything at all about what it means to be poor?

While the idea of tax incentives to help with poverty isn’t the dumbest idea in the world, there are a couple of things that need to be remembered.

First of all, poor people don’t have a lot of disposable income. They struggle with every paycheck to make ends meet. Poor people can’t wait all year to get a lump sum back on their taxes. They need the money in each paycheck.

Secondly, if you make it work somehow so that the money intended for health insurance is included in each check, i.e. each check is slightly larger, you create a new dilemma. The average poor person now has the funds available to improve their lives in some material way or buy health insurance.

This may sound silly, but the choices could be quite tempting. Imagine if you were a single mother who could get a two bedroom apartment rather than squeezing into a one bedroom place with the extra money. Imagine if the extra money provided enough money to buy groceries, or car insurance so that you could get to work. Suddenly that extra cash in your pocket creates a lot of new challenges.

What we need to decide as a society is this: Is healthcare a right or a privilege?

If it is a privilege, then we can just stop worrying about it. We can let the free market disperse it like Garth Brooks CDs or Silly Putty. We can all agree that it is a good thing to have, but nothing you are entitled to. We all agree that it would be nice if everyone could own a home, but we don’t lose any sleep over the fact that this is not how it works out.

If we decide that healthcare is a right, then we need to address it as such. The free market works well for portions of it, but markets are not the best mechanism to distribute something that we all have a right to.

Simply put, the free market is what got us into this mess with healthcare in the first place.

Bush’s proposal on healthcare seems about as well thought out as his National Energy Policy. If one were cynical you might be inclined to think a bad idea like this is being advanced for the same reasons the energy policy was: to enrich certain interests at the expense of the nation.

But, you’d have to be pretty cynical to believe that.