Placing the Blame

I was standing in my favorite bakery this afternoon waiting for my half dozen canoli when I looked up to see our president on the TV behind a podium.  I had heard there was going to be a press conference on the administration’s dust-up with the Catholic Church regarding the administrative mandate to provide contraception and related services, including abortion, as part of the organization’s group health plan.

A banner under the podium said “Press conference on availability of contraception.”  Although the volume was turned down on the TV, I was struck by the amazing lack of precision in defining the source of the problem that was causing the confrontation. 

Roe vs. Wade long ago solidified the “availability” of the services in question.  The press conference was actually about the government attempt to force a religious organization to provide these services despite their moral objection to them.

It is apparently easier to criticize the church for insensitivity and lack of concern for women’s reproductive rights than to address the unconstitutional power grab by the Department of Health and Human Services.  It’s even easier to criticize cancer since I have recently been informed that birth control pills reduce the chance of women developing the dreaded disease.

I’ve been told that abortion increases the likelihood of women developing cancer in later years, but I haven’t heard that argument from those who support the mandate.  And of course the dastardly insurance companies must share some of the blame since they’re being mandated to provide the contraception services free of charge.  Of course, we all know there’s no “free lunch.” The insurance company isn’t going to foot the bill.  The cost will simply be passed along to policy holders who are foolish enough to actually pay their own premiums.  I guess they must share some of the guilt as well, although I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

This brings me to our situation in the Granite State regarding the establishment of a Cancer Centers of America facility.  This proposal would provide another choice for cancer treatment, bring jobs and tax revenue to the state and collateral income to local businesses as out-of-staters travel to the facility.  The hospitals and usual big government supporters have lined up against the proposal.  Again, those in opposition have failed to identify the source of the problem.

The campaign to stop the proposal has been particularly nasty.  The search for blame has taken on unbelievable stridency, looking for culprits in places most of us wouldn’t imagine.  One argument claims too many hospitals will cause some facilities to close.  This seems ridiculous on the face of it.  Can we really have too much medical care?  

The process seems simple enough.  Hospitals are required to treat some patients for nothing or next to nothing.  If they do too much of this, they will run out of money and go bankrupt.  Oddly enough, as some hospitals fold, the burden of nonpaying patients is increased on the remaining hospitals, making bankruptcy more likely in those facilities.  The old “domino effect.”

The subliminal argument from the establishment hospitals and big government devotees seems to be, “If we have accepted these irrational mandates that are bankrupting our hospitals, the cancer facility should have to accept them too.”  Of course this is the “level playing field” argument.  In other words, no matter how irrational the current system is, as long as we are all equally irrational, somehow it will all work out.

The next target was the sponsors of the bill.  Articles dripping with affected revulsion have claimed the legislators were bought with a cheap seats ticket to beautiful downtown Philadelphia and a free lunch in the hospital cafeteria.  (I wonder if I could get a bill introduced for a half dozen canoli?)  It’s ironic that those who seem to insist a “free lunch” can indeed exist, find it difficult to believe an underpaid New Hampshire representative could actually get a free lunch without strings attached.  The employees of the Catholic hospitals can surely receive “free” contraception services, but our representatives can’t get a free sandwich without raising eyebrows.

It seems to me this unreasonable anger and nastiness should be aimed at those who forced the ridiculous “free lunch” mandates on the hospitals in the first place.  There is no such thing as free care.  Somebody always pays, it’s just a question of who.  If the government wants the hospitals to treat citizens without insurance or the ability to pay, the government should figure out how to pay for it, not the hospitals.  And that means the government can’t pretend to pay as they do with Medicaid, which covers less than 20 percent of the actual cost of services.  They need to find a way to pay for the real costs.

In the now defunct Soviet Union workers had a saying:  “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”  The system didn’t work real well, but as long as everyone suffered equally, they all seemed satisfied.  Of course the politicians and administrators at the top really did get paid, and even had free lunches on a regular basis.  As Jakov Smirnoff used to say, “What a country!”

Our children are too young to remember the reality of collectivism: equal pain for all.  They now look at the map where the Soviet Union used to be and say “What country?”