ACTION

By Francis Menton

Over in Congress, Republicans are gradually getting their act together on rolling back Obamacare, at least in part. That of course has brought out a torrent of hysterical reaction from the progressive punditocracy. To these people it seems just glaringly obvious that there is a moral imperative to provide "healthcare for all" through some kind of government handout or coercion. After all, we all know that socialized provision of goods and services works flawlessly, and the government has an infinite pile of free money to pass out. We do know those things, don't we?

On Monday, the New York Times op-ed page had no fewer than three pieces on the subject of Republican healthcare proposals by the in-house columnists, each more hysterical than the next. Not meaning to give the likes of Krugman a pass on this one, but let me focus on the piece by Charles Blow, titled "Republican Death Wish." Excerpt:

The A.C.A. had made a basic societal deal: The young, healthy and rich would subsidize access to insurance for the older, sicker and poorer. But this demanded that the former gave a damn about the latter, that people genuinely believed that saving lives was more important than saving money, that we weren’t living some Darwinian Hunger Games of health care where health and wealth march in lockstep. . . . Let’s cut to the quick: Access to affordable health care keeps people alive and healthy and keeps families solvent. Take that away, and people get sick, run up enormous, crippling debt and in the worst cases, die. It is really that simple.

"Access to affordable healthcare" keeps people "alive and healthy." This is one of those things that is just so blindingly obvious that it has to be true. So what is the actual evidence?

▪ There's that big randomized trial out of Oregon in 2013 that found, after two years, that there were "no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes" between those with access to Medicaid and not. A follow up study after five years showed that the same results persisted.

▪ The big selling point of Soviet communism was supposedly the free universal access to health care. In the early years, life expectance under communism did increase -- but then, it also increased in the capitalist countries that had nothing like free universal health care at the time. By the end of the Soviet Union in the late 80s, that country was facing what was by then called a "health crisis," accompanied by dramatically lower life expectancy, particularly for men, than in the capitalist countries without the free universal health care. This study from the British Medical Journal in 1988 shows male life expectancy in the late-stage Soviet Union as only 65 years. Wait, doesn't "access to affordable healthcare" keep people "alive and healthy"? Maybe not so much. And by the way, in post-communism Russia, life expectancy has not recovered.

And then, can we please look at what is going on down there in Venezuela. Free universal health care was the core promise of Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian revolution. For the latest, check out, for example, from Fox News on April 7, "Venezuela's health crisis nearing catastrophe, government pleads for help"...

(Francis Menton is retired after 40+ years (31 as a partner) with the law firm of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP. Today he is the publisher of The Manhattan Contrarian)

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