All You Need To Know About Healthcare Reform
Posted by Lew Rockwell on January 8, 2010 06:43 PM
Wrote Ludwig von Mises in Socialism (1922):
- To the intellectual champions of social insurance, and to the
politicians and statesmen who enacted it, illness and health appeared as
two conditions of the human body sharply separated from each other and
always recognizable without difficulty or doubt. Any doctor could
diagnose the characteristics of health. Illness was a bodily
phenomenon which showed itself independently of human will, and was not
susceptible to influence by will. There were people who for some reason
or other simulated illness, but a doctor could expose the pretense. Only
the healthy person was fully efficient. The efficiency of the sick person
was lowered according to the gravity and nature of his illness, and the
doctor was able, by means of objectively ascertainable physiological
tests, to indicate the degree of the reduction of efficiency.
- Now every statement in this theory is false. There is no clearly defined frontier between health and illness. Being ill is not a phenomenon independent of conscious will and of psychic forces working in the subconscious. A mans efficiency is not merely the result of his physical condition; it depends largely on his mind and will. Thus the whole idea of being able to separate, by medical examination, the unfit from the fit and from the malingerers, and those able to work from those unable to work, proves to be untenable. Those who believed that accident and medical insurance could be based on completely effective means of ascertaining illnesses and injuries and their consequences were very much mistaken. The destructionist aspect of accident and health insurance lies above all in the fact that such institutions promote accidents and illness, hinder recovery, and very often create, or at any rate intensify and lengthen, the functional disorders which follow illness or accident.
- Feeling healthy is quite different from being healthy in the medical sense, and a mans ability to work is largely independent of the physiologically ascertainable and measurable performances of his individual organs. The man who does not want to be healthy is not merely a malingerer. He is a sick person. If the will to be well and efficient is weakened, illness and inability to work is caused. By weakening or completely destroying the will to be well and able to work, social insurance creates illness and inability to work; it produces the habit of complaining which is in itself a neurosis and neuroses of other kinds. In short, it is an institution which tends to encourage disease, not to say accidents, and to intensify considerably the physical and psychic results of accidents and illnesses. As a social institution it makes a people sick bodily and mentally or at least helps to multiply, lengthen, and intensify disease.
- Now every statement in this theory is false. There is no clearly defined frontier between health and illness. Being ill is not a phenomenon independent of conscious will and of psychic forces working in the subconscious. A mans efficiency is not merely the result of his physical condition; it depends largely on his mind and will. Thus the whole idea of being able to separate, by medical examination, the unfit from the fit and from the malingerers, and those able to work from those unable to work, proves to be untenable. Those who believed that accident and medical insurance could be based on completely effective means of ascertaining illnesses and injuries and their consequences were very much mistaken. The destructionist aspect of accident and health insurance lies above all in the fact that such institutions promote accidents and illness, hinder recovery, and very often create, or at any rate intensify and lengthen, the functional disorders which follow illness or accident.
