Dueling Health Plans

BACK WHEN I was on the board of Music Center of the Northwest here in Seattle, we once discussed whether to offer the faculty benefits. Good idea, said the men; we could set up a 401(k). Good idea, said the women; we could offer health insurance.

Health care is important to women. I recently listened to Ruth Messinger, CEO of American Jewish World Service, tell a fundraiser about a microloan program in the Third World. The women recipients immediately applied their earnings to the education and the health care of their children.

What kind of health care do women want? If you ask a woman, she will probably tell you about the individual health care needs of the people she knows and cares about. She wants health care that meets her needs and the needs of those she cares about.

That’s what sank HillaryCare 1.0. Women took a look at it and couldn’t tell whether it met their particular needs.

That’s why Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-NY) HillaryCare 2.0 is called “The American Health Choices Plan.”

But Republican presidential candidates are ready with alternative plans. In case you weren’t sure what they are, Karl Rove has laid an eight-point plan in the Wall Street Journal. A good name for Karl’s plan would be “Health Choices, Not ‘Choices.’”

For a plan with “choices” in the title Sen. Clinton’s plan seems to involve an awful lot of additional government, including expansion of Medicare, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program.

Ol’ Fred Thompson, chatting confidentially to us on “Fred and HillaryCare” from the back seat of a limo, wondered why a plan with all those choices would demand that “you prove that you have insurance before you get a job.”

Why is it that the liberal Hillary Clinton’s health plan is full of compulsion and mandates while Karl Rove’s plan is full of health consumers spending their own money to get the health care they want?

Margaret Thatcher explained it to Woman’s Own nearly twenty years ago.

There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.

There is no use in people expecting society to solve their problems, she pointed out. Society doesn’t solve problems, people do. And the way that individual men and women solve their problems is through their families.

Even Hillary Clinton can see that. “It takes a village,” she once said. But the African village of which she spoke was a village of close blood relatives—extended families that looked after each other through instinct, through the emotional bonds of love, shame, and guilt, and through unconscious tradition.

In the city the extended family breaks down, and the network of kin loyalty shrivels into the nuclear family. How did people build community in the impersonal society of the big city to replace the support of the kindred?

They invented new forms of community to replace the protection they had enjoyed as rural extended families. By the nineteenth century these new communities included self-governing Christian churches in which the emotional obligations of the extended family were instantiated in a church family. And they included labor unions and fraternal lodges in which the obligations of blood-brotherhood were instantiated in voluntary associations where men just called each other “brother.” It was an ingenious solution; the sort of thing that ordinary people do every day.

But some high-born men didn’t like the nuclear family. In particular, the post-Napoleonic war baby-boomers, a generation that came to adulthood in the 1830s and 1840s, wanted to be liberated from the oppression of the “bourgeois” family. By the middle of the twentieth century high-born women like Simone de Beauvoir decided that they wanted to be liberated too.

There are individual men and women and there are families. When you have broken the emotional bonds of family, even the bare-bones nuclear family, then you are pretty well down to individuals.

But how do individuals survive in the impersonal society of the big city? They have sundered the emotional bonds of the extended family and scorned the bonds of the bourgeois family and church family that replaced it.

If you seek the answer it is all around you. It is the administrative state and its comprehensive and mandatory programs. Individuals who “bowl alone” need to force other people to help them meet their needs.

So it makes sense that the presidential candidates of the party of married religious people with children would propose a voluntary health care program based on people choosing the health care that was best for their families. It makes sense that the presidential candidates of the party of single secular childless people would propose a mandatory health care program that was based on force.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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