Gingrich v. Government Health Care?

In a Washington Post Op-Ed with Texas Gov. Rick Perry (11/6/2009), Newt Gingrich focused upon what he must consider to be his best case against the Pelosi-care bill. His is a very pragmatic argument against expanding federal regulation of health care: if it has not worked then try something else, but do not stop and examine the failed premise at the heart of the problem. In his effort at opposition, Gingrich demonstrates that he is not in fact opposing the fundamental error, but instead accepts and embraces it.

According to Gingrich, the Democrats’ plan violates the proper relationship between the federal and state governments by imposing an unfunded mandate upon the states and ignoring state efforts seeking waivers to federal regulations that would enable state innovation in health care reform.

As evidence for his advocacy of multiple disjointed concurrent state-centric reform efforts, he cites 1) the positive impacts from Texas’ tort reform that resulted in the availability of more doctors, and reduced costs for liability insurance and lawsuit settlements, 2) the unpermitted promise offered by Texas’ Medicaid reform proposals to facilitate the indigents’ acquisition of private insurance and reduce emergency room expenses, 3) the poor quality of care under Medicaid caused by federally imposed price controls, and 4) the high costs of improper payments within Medicaid.

Essentially, his argument is that federal direction of health care policy has not worked and should not be expanded; instead he argues that this failed regulatory system should be reformed by devolving policy decisions to state governments. While this particular position pragmatically contradicts Gingrich’s advocating elsewhere that federal regulation of interstate commerce nullify state mandates upon private insurance contracts, inconsistency within his own positions is not his primary error.

Gingrich, Pelosi, and the Democrat sponsored health care proposals share an invalid view of the proper role of government. All agree that through democracy our representatives can dictate via statute any health care policy that is ephemerally supported in a public opinion poll by 50% + 1 of the electorate, and that such policy can be changed to the opposite tomorrow when the poll results shift. Their elevation of popular whim evades the fact that such democratically based legislative commands on health care policy violate individual Americans’ fundamental right to association and contract.

Currently, public health care policy is based upon the premise that government should force someone other than the patient to pay for the patient’s medical bills, a compelled risk sharing scheme. Consequently, public health care plans (Medicare and Medicaid) are going bankrupt; meanwhile, government subsidized employer-based health care plans erode jobs and wages by diverting capital from productive investments. In response to this government sponsored failure, our two political factions argue about how an intrusive government can solve the problems created by intrusive government policy.

Instead of focusing upon what novel pragmatic actions could be taken by government to maintain the premise that each of us must be forced by government to pay for someone else’s health care, a new perspective is needed to focus upon individual rights, an individual’s freedom to act without compulsion while respecting others’ freedom to act independently upon their own judgment. Concretely, this focus upon individual rights in health care policy would result in protecting individual contract rights from state mandates, civil suit reform to facilitate the timely and just resolution of private disputes, ending the expansion of government’s policy domain through legislative abuse of the tax code, and winding redistributionist public welfare programs down to their complete elimination.