Principles in Practice: The Blog of the Objective Standard

Saturday, October 06, 2007

It's Time to Jump SCHIP

Posted by ARI Media at 10:41 AM

Irvine, CA—President Bush vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have expanded the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which was established to insure children whose parents did not qualify for Medicaid but who could not afford private health insurance. The expanded program would have covered an additional four million children from households that have yearly incomes as high as $83,000. Bush declared that while he "strongly supports reauthorization of SCHIP," he regards its expansion as a dangerous step toward socialized medicine.

"But by declaring his support for SCHIP," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "Bush has already endorsed the perverse moral principle that is leading us toward socialized medicine.

"In trying to justify any government welfare program—whether social security, food stamps, or socialized medicine—advocates appeal to the fact that the intended recipients need the service but are unable to pay for it. Thus, the fact that some families 'need' health care but can't afford it entitles them to it—and so the government must institute programs like Medicaid and SCHIP to ensure that they get it. Such appeals count on the unstated principle that 'need' is the criterion of moral value and standard of just desserts.

"In her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand exposes the viciousness of this moral principle, showing how it sacrifices the productive and successful to the incompetent and indolent. 'A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness—non-existence—as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defeat: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw—the zero. Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure of your gain' (Atlas Shrugged).

"This moral inversion underlies the demand for socialized medicine, which says that some people's need of health care gives them the right to make slaves of doctors, insurance companies, and hospitals. If we are to avoid the destruction of our health care system promised by socialized medicine, we must reject the perverse moral principle at its root and restore freedom to America's health care system."

Labels: Ayn Rand and Objectivism, Healthcare, Individual Rights and Law