I don’t mean to pick on Kathleen Parker but I can’t help myself. She attempts to engage us with logical reasoning and utterly fails. Her main point today is that it is inappropriate and misleading to compare the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that desegregated the South. There’s plenty to work with here if you’re inclined to pursue the argument. But Parker goes about it like this:
On “Hardball” this week, as Chris Matthews was cross-examining a guest about the constitutionality of the insurance mandate — the main issue before the Supreme Court — he asked whether she thought the Civil Rights Act was constitutional. After all, that piece of legislation (correctly) forced businesses to sell goods and services to people they otherwise might have chosen to deny access.
This would be a dandy argument if the two issues were remotely related. Yes, they are similar inasmuch as the federal government imposed laws on individuals related to personal decision-making. And yes, those decisions revolved around commerce. But zebras and dogs are also similar — they both have four legs and a tail — and yet we know they are not the same animal.
The health-care mandate forces business and individuals to buy something against their will. The mandate facilitates access to health care the same way being pushed off a diving board facilitates swimming.
She starts out well enough by noting that compelling someone to sell something is not the same as compelling someone to buy something. But then she says that the forcing people to be insured is like pushing them off a diving board.
Let’s be clear about a couple of things. First, the mandate is an option. You can choose to pay the tax if you don’t want the insurance. If you refuse to pay the tax, no criminal charges will be brought against you and there will be no liens against your property. Second, the mandate asks you to buy insurance, not health care. The analogy to swimming doesn’t work on any level. A better analogy would be to say that the mandate is the fee you pay to access the pool. You might argue that you don’t want to go swimming. But how would it work out if you showed up next week with your flip-flops and a towel and demanded free entry? You’d be laughed out of town.
Imagine that you live in a condominium with dozens of other households. Your little community has a pool as well as a clubhouse, tennis courts, and a contract with a local landscaper. You pay a fee for the pool even if you don’t know how to swim and will never use it. No one is forcing you to go swimming. Likewise, the mandate doesn’t force you to go to the doctor. What it does is say that all your medical care must be paid for with insurance. You can’t opt out of your obligation to pay for the upkeep of the system until the moment you want to use it. Just like you can’t opt out of your community fees and pay cash if and when you ever learn to swim.
Except, you actually can opt out if you’re willing to be a deadbeat. It’s not like anything will actually happen to you if you refuse to either get insurance or pay the tax.
The truth is, in this analogy, we all wind up in the pool. The only question is whether we helped pay for the pool before we used it. And if you can’t afford to pay for the upkeep of the pool, you can get some help with that.
I don’t like being told that I have to buy for-profit insurance. I’d prefer a public option. But let’s not pretend this is tyranny. It’s a half-ass compromise that turned out to be the best we could do.