James Q. Wilson Quotes
I believe we ought to subsidize some health care for the poor, but Medicare subsidizes everyone's health care.
Wilson, James Q. American Government: Institutions and Policies. D.C. Heath, 1989.
There were many countries whose laws proclaimed that health care was a right but could not deliver the health care to many of its citizens. However, every developed country except the United States considered health care a right and delivered health care to its people. The large majority of U. S. citizens received good health care but not as a right.
Unlike most forms of insurance virtually everyone will have one or more claims and collect in his or her lifetime. Many of use will never have an automobile crash and collect on our insurance policy, but health is different in that we all change health status from well to ill at times and if we are fortunate we return to a state of wellness. But as Eigen observes, most of us who are tell are only temporarily well, With time our state will change to ill and if we are not very fortunate we will never use our health insurance as we will be dead. There is almost no way to age in a modern society without needing health care or funeral services, That is the consequence of the normal process of aging. So with health insurance schemes we, in effect, pass money from the living well to the living ill. So if health care costs increase fastr than inflation, which it has almost always done in the last half century, the temporarily well will be paying more and more. The only way to break that cycle is to somehow limit the cost increases of health care to that of the inflationary increase. Eigen has argued that most of us focus on the wrong problem--the details of the way the well pay for the ill, when the only soltuion is to reduce the rate of increases of health care costs. And there are only 2 ways to do that: Reduce the compensation for all the health care actors--physicians, nurses, other staff, hospitals, and manufacturers of medical equipment, supplies and expecially pharmaceuticals which have been increasing at the fastest rate of all or wer privide more and more effective prevention.
This quotation is interesting for two reasons: First, President Donald Trump had campagned on teh promise of Universal Health Insurance and in the early days of the Tramp Administration, Trump's Manager of the Office of Management and Budget effectivly repudiated Trum's campaign promise. Second, it ilustrates the narrownss to the thinking of soem of the very conservative politicians of the era. Virtually every industiral democracy in the world had universial health or health insurance coverage. Mulvaney's thinking was limited to teh classic U. S. model of health insurance premiums being paid by individuals and companies to privat insurance companies. Yet most other countries had teh government coelect the money and pay the health providers (the single payer system) of simply funded universal ehalth care through the general tax revenues, and had no specific act of buying a policy so there was no way for people to refuse.
James Quinn Wilson was an American conservative academic, political scientist, and an authority on public administration. Most of his career was spent as a professor at UCLA and Harvard University. He was the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1985–1990), and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard-MIT.
