Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Health Care Fiasco Follow-Up

On a bit of a more personal note, I arrived home today to see a brand new Matrix hatchback parked in my driveway. The car belongs to my roommate's girlfriend, a woman with a young child. The woman is currently on food stamps, and I have previously gotten into arguments with her over the introduction of a universal health care system in the U.S.

In short, her position is "I can't afford health care for my baby. The government should do it for me." This goes along the same reasoning as to why she accepts food stamp assistance from the state.

Yet, there in my driveway is a brand new, $20,000 automobile. She's surely paying hundreds a month for an automobile she does not need, and has the gall to say the government (read: other people) should pay for her food and health care.

This kind of an outrageous use of taxpayer money for personal enrichment is what is so infuriating about the health care debate in the United States. Yes, there are people out there who cannot provide health care insurance for themselves, but its not everybody. Most people that don't have health care insurance don't simply because the cost is very high, and other, immediate wants, control their spending habits. Things, like new cars and high definition televisions, are too hard for many to resist when confronted with the decision between health insurance and needless frills. So many of the uninsured people in the United States have no health care out of voluntary choice: the choice to buy the car outweighing the cost of health care insurance compared to the perceived chance of illness , and in the end, the 2008 Matrix in my driveway proved too enticing for my roommate's girlfriend to resist. Though she could have saved herself $30,000 by purchasing a $1200 used BMW like I did instead of paying the car's ticket price and interest on the car loan for five years, she, like many others, chose not to. She chose dependence upon the government over self-reliance. Why? Because she was allowed to by the slew of welfare-state programs that allow her to abandon responsibility for the care of her child.

Though I have never been on food stamps, Medicaid, or any other governmental welfare-state program, I have known many, many people who have, and these people have all shared a single, common bond - they didn't need the assistance they were receiving. They just wanted it.

Getting $160 worth of food stamps every month, for the people I have known accepting such assistance, has simply meant an additional $160 of monthly expendable income, which in my experience has usually been used to purchase alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, or another needless frill. While there are people who genuinely need welfare, food stamps, and government health care assistance, the vast majority of people in these programs do not, and the end result is American citizens, taxpaying individuals across the country, end up paying for the "needed" services for a group of people that don't "need" the help, in the purest sense of the word.

As someone with a pretty heavily libertarian bend, I foresee an American of the future where the tiny fraction of people who honestly cannot provide for themselves are assisted to the extent of their need through charitable donations. In lieu of enough charity in the United States to provide assistance to these people, which though I doubt would happen I certainly can admit the possibility, then even this libertarian is willing to concede that the state could be allowed to provide for these people. Yet the main gist of this post remains the same - most people receiving state assistance for food, medical care, or housing, don't actually need it. Only by removing the free giveaway of goods, services, and dollars to these people can you ever hope to encourage unwed single mothers like my roommate's girlfriend to buy some goddamn health insurance for her child instead of a shiny new car.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

First of all, if this woman is on food stamps, then she is likely eligible for health care coverage for her child. Nonetheless, the flaws in our health care system which you pointed out in the last blog are what makes insurance so unaffordable for single moms. I agree with the point that if she can afford a $30,000 car, she can afford to pay some premiums, and likely for her own food costs as well.
I've been a single mom for almost 9 years now (which is why I can't help but feel implicated here). And I've known a lot of single moms like the one you just described. It's infuriating that women like this give all single moms a bad name, and perpetuate the myth that we "need" the government to care for us. But if we didn't have such a predatory health care system, we wouldn't have to depend on governmental aid to get by.
I drive a 91 Toyota Carolla. It was a gift from family members who weren't putting it to use. It gets great gas mileage and serves its purpose of getting me to work and my child and I to school. Yes, I accept food stamps--though the state gives me more than I need, upon notifying them of this they refused to reduce my monthly budget and return the superfluous funds to the taxpayers--but I use the money I save to buy a college degree, not a car. The whole system is broken, but when the choice to raise a child independently becomes an instant ticket to the bottom rung of social and economic mobility, I say work it (the system) the best you can. But do it for an education, not a new ride.
Yes, I do see the irony in using the welfare system to get a degree which I will use in the future to educate young people on why the welfare state doesn't work, but I also see the tactical advantages of using the system to fight the system.
Anyways, the point is this: I agree with your argument that this particular single mom is not as in need as she'd like to claim, but welfare is allegedly designed to help people out of their situation of need (in a free market system the number of these people would be dramatically lower), and if you're not using it for this purpose, you are indeed abusing it. Life is about making choices, and the choice not to fester at the bottom of the social ladder is one that requires taking advantage of all resources available to you.
"Need" is a debatable term--I don't "need" a college education. But I have a feeling society would be a lot better off if more single moms would use the "saftey net" to better themselves in a way that would allow them to give back to a society that is indeed being robbed of its prosperity by the ongoing warfare/welfare state.

adropofreason said...

Molly, I'm glad you are the first comment on my blog, especially in regards to a topic you know a great deal about.

I did not mean to imply, by any means, that all people utilizing government assistance necessarily abuse it. To the contrary, even as a libertarian, I am not against some forms of social safety nets, however I see these safety nets, in any prosperous, truly free-market society to come int he form of charity, I understand the societal necessity for nets of this type.

The problem with the social safety nets in the U.S. now is the fact that people like my roommmate's girlfriend tend to be the rule, and not the exception. Single mothers on food stamps and other forms of government acceptance like yourself that attempt to use the system to benefit yourself through education, instead of meaningless consumerism, are the rationale behind the entire idea of governmental assistance. You are going to school where you otherwise could not.