‘Medicare-for-All’ is no ‘Solution’ to Pandemic-Related Job Layoffs

In a 3/19/20 New Jersey Star-Ledger letter to the editor titled Layoff threat proves need for Medicare for All, Nate Hutchinson of Hoboken, NJ wrote, in part:

Hoboken is threatening to lay off 79 municipal employees to fix its budget deficit, citing (among other factors) the rising cost of providing these employees with health insurance, which is administered by a private (for-profit) third party. At a recent city council meeting, many of those threatened with layoffs described the hardships they would face if they lost their jobs and their health coverage.

Hutchinson’s solution; Medicare-for-All to “provide health coverage to every U.S. resident that is free at the point of use and lower national health spending in the process.”

Criminal socialists of the American Left have been exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to push this line. I fired off this letter to the Star-Ledger:

To the editors,

Some are citing the Covid-19 pandemic as “proof” of the “need” for Medicare-for-All because many who are losing their jobs in this health emergency will also lose their health insurance. If we already had Medicare-for-All, the argument goes, this would not be a problem. 

But Medicare-for-All would outlaw private health insurance, strip 180 million Americans of their health insurance and force them into a government program whether they agree or not, an immoral (and probably unconstitutional) approach. Worse, Medicare-for-All would essentially enslave the doctors and regiment the entire healthcare industry under a coercive monopsony from which there is no escape, stifling innovative healthcare progress.

That said, employer-based health insurance is a real problem for people losing their jobs. The moral, rights-respecting solution would be to revise the tax and regulatory laws so that health insurance is treated like homeowners, auto, and other types of insurance. What the Covid-19 pandemic actually proves is that if these reforms had been done years ago, the loss of a job wouldn’t mean loss of health insurance.

Sincerely,

Michael A. LaFerrara

Hutchinson concludes with a complaint “that private health insurers use their political power to block any reforms. Hoboken’s city workers deserve better than this. So do the rest of us.”

Political clout? Who the hell is Hutchinson to speak for “the rest of us?” Who the hell is he to advocate using “political clout”—the point of a governmental gun— to impose his Medicare-for-All on the rest of us? 

Kudos to the private health insurers for exercising their First Amendment rights to lobby to block the implementation of this monstrosity. Private health insurers would be among the biggest victims of Medicare-for-All. They use their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech, assembly, and petition to defend themselves. But whenever a person or group of persons defend their own rights, they defend the rights of all. These insurers speak also for those of us who want to preserve the remnants of freedom and individual rights that still remains in American healthcare.

* [NOTE: I sent this letter in on 3/19/20. As of 3/28/20, it was not yet published. I would change one word. In the first paragraph, I would change the word “the” in the phrase “the argument goes” to “one,” so as to read “If we already had Medicare-for-All, one argument goes, this would not be a problem.”]

Related Reading:

Moral Health Care vs. Universal Health Care by Lin Zinser and Paul Hsieh for The Objective Standard

How Doctors Broke Health Care by Christy Ford Chapin for Reason.com

As ObamaCare Failures Pile Up, Get Ready for the Mother-of-All Healthcare Battles

To Start With, Single Payer is Immoral

The Problem of the "Unemployed and Uninsured"

The False Alternative to the 3rd-Party-Payer System

Blaming the Remaining Fragments of Healthcare Freedom for Problems Caused by Government

Why a “Right” to Health Care is a Moral Travesty by John Hersey for The Objective Standard