Comments on: Fatherly Governance – Carl Peter Klapper

By: Carl Peter Klapper

Carl Peter Klapper — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:53:05 +0000

Thanks, Art, for your reply.

I would disagree that health care was ever provided strictly within a free market. There was always a lot of fudging around care for the poor, for one thing, and secondly, doctors have traditionally worked under a set of motivations closer to judges than to merchants. We tend to frown upon judges who are market-driven and offer their opinions for the benefit of the highest briber, I mean “bidder”. And we are still shocked by the few blatant cases of market-driven doctors, fifty years of medical insurance notwithstanding.

What IS a market provided entity is health insurance. Even that, though, has not been an entirely free market. The premiums for the public health insurance have been deducted from employee paychecks for decades. In addition, health insurance is a required benefit under a variety of circumstances, especially with unions. These demand-side restrictions notwithstanding, I would agree that the president’s vision and the Democratic legislators’ plans is more socialist than what is currently in place. However, I disagree with you about what is being made more socialist. They are promoting a socialist medical INSURANCE system.

And that is the key point in my dispute with both the Democrats and the Republicans about health care reform, as well as with the current political debate which you so accurately described. I want to evict insurance from the house of medicine, forcibly if necessary. No amount of good behavior by insurance will justify its continued presence there, so it is moot whether that behavior is gained by the discipline of the free market or by government regulation…

By: Art Apgar

Art Apgar — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:51:42 +0000

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Carl. I think that simply put our difference lies in whether close government regulation is better for our nations health care system then the current free market.
This is the crux of the current political debate about the president’s
vision for a (yes, I’ll say it again) socialized medical system.

By: Carl Peter Klapper

Carl Peter Klapper — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:58:21 +0000

Thanks for your comments, Art. Though you are, of course, welcome to your beliefs, it does not follow that because you happen to believe that something is socialist or “extreme socialist” that it then is. Apparently, you believe that the police and firefighters are socialist and that by adding the providers of a related service, doctors and nurses, we would tip over into “extreme socialist”. I disagree with your premise that having police or firefighters in a local government is socialist. If such was the case, we have been living under socialism for a good two centuries now. There are public functions that should be performed by government, though various political philosophies disagree about which those are. My argument, based on family experience and knowledge of history, is that doctors never functioned like shopkeepers or industrial enterprises, that their bills often ended up as useless scraps of paper for the executors of their wills to dispose of and therefore it is best to end the farce and hire them into a public service. Indeed, prior to insurance, they often were in public service when on staff at “name-your-city” General Hospital, or they were in the offloaded-onto-the-charities kind of public service when on staff at a charity hospital.

Your second sentence is irrelevant as I have not advocated a dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise.

Your third and following sentences shows you have not read my other essays here. Suffice it to say that I am against entitlements. BTW, that includes pensions for public officials. Also, I was against the bailout as soon as I found out it was a possibility — before my column here — as I am a firm advocate of the discipline of the market.

Finally, I have to question whether you have even read this essay with your last sentence. There will never be health care reform until insurance is removed from medicine, until medicine is returned to something closer to its role prior to insurance. The coverage mandates are then moot, there being no coverage.

By: Art Apgar

Art Apgar — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:55:49 +0000

I believe that the idea of reducing medical professionals to the same level as police and firefighters funded by the government takes healthcare to an extreme socialist level. The USA grew to be the great country that it is today by the freedom of its people in their pursuit of vocation, life and happiness not by the guidance of a benevolent dictatorship style of government. Many of our problems today are the result of misguided federal mandates such as welfare that stifiles personal initiative and responsibility and misguided federal loan initiatives that force banks to make home loans to people that will be unable to repay them. The ambiguous treatment of the corporate world – faulting companies that make money and firing executives and taking over companies that don’t . The answer is to return to smaller government, lower taxes and a free market. Health care reform will follow when the government removes their mandates from healthcare and related insurance

By: Carl Peter Klapper

Carl Peter Klapper — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:00:49 +0000

Though I favor federal subsidies to assist states in paying off their debt, establishing their endowment and paying a minimal per-capita cost of essential services, and though I also favor the state paying municipal workers, including doctors, nurses and other medical workers in the municipal medical departments, on a statewide pay scale, I am not advocating a “single-payer” system at any stage. Nor are any of these preferences for funding essential for my proposal. In keeping with the more traditional introduction of innovations in government, we may have a smattering of cities and towns starting their medical departments by taking over hospitals in receivership or by hiring doctors to supplement paramedic units and incrementally building on that foundation. This more incremental approach could be enabled by bootstrap funding and provide an argument for the founding of municipal medical departments elsewhere.

The capitalist aspect of Popular Capitalism is what grants additional rights and freedoms. It is as simple and prosaic as that. If you succeed in business, you can do more and, if in doing more you overreach and fail, you lose those additional rights and freedoms. BTW, populism has had this preference for market discipline since Tom Watson: “We Jeffersonians stand for the doctrine that the world’s stock of wealth and of opportunity belongs to all mankind — to be won or lost on the basis of merit or demerit … The holder of wealth has no right to legislate his fortune out of the reach of the risks and changes of legitimate business. He has no right to legislate his wealth into a mortgage upon the revenue of the government and the annual produce of all”

By: Alexander

Alexander — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:05:25 +0000

Just to be clear, you feel that health care should be funded by state and federal governments in some sort of single-payer system, correct?
Also, am I correct in understanding that Popular Capitalism would, in theory, grant rights, freedoms and privileges based on prior experiences and records? I.e. you would have to earn certain rights or privileges and those rights would be conditional upon further service and exemplary behavior.