On Those "Uninsured"

Thomas Sowell, writing for National Review Online:

The magic number du jour is the number of Americans without health insurance. Apparently getting more people insured is another “good thing” — which is to say, it is something whose costs are not to be weighed against the benefits, or whose costs are to be finessed aside with optimistic projections or a claim that these costs can be covered by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

In real life, people weigh one thing against another. But in politics, one declares one thing to be imperative, so the issue then becomes how we do it. In real life, all sorts of desirable things are not done, either because other desirable things would have to be sacrificed or because the dangers incurred in achieving the desired objective are worse than the problem we want to solve.

Almost never are the dangers of having uninsured people weighed against the dangers of having government bureaucrats overruling doctors and deciding whether money would be better spent saving the life of an elderly person or paying for an abortion for some teenager.

The crowning irony is that the problems caused by insurance companies’ refusing to pay for certain medications or treatments are to be solved by giving government bureaucrats that same power, along with the power to prevent patients from using their own money to pay for those same medications or treatments.