As the debate over health care reform gets underway, Reason.tv asks, What if government ran health care?

Approximately one minute.

Produced by Meredith Bragg, Austin Bragg, and Nick Gillespie.

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I had an interesting conversation with a British journalist once about whether it was better to describe Margaret Thatcher’s economic views as anti-state or anti-union. That old chat came back to mind when I read the maverick Marxist Brendan O’Neill’s argument that welfare payments were a weapon of sorts in the battle against labor militants:

The welfare state, still so beloved of many left-wing radicals, has cynically redefined huge swathes of the British population as sick rather than unemployed. As one striking study points out, in the last 20 years of the twentieth century, from 1981 to 1999, the number of individuals of working age in Britain — mostly men aged 16 to 64 — who were claiming Incapacity Benefit (IB) rose exponentially. IB is the social security benefit paid to individuals who are ‘unable to work because of ill-health, injury or disability’. In April 1981, 463,000 men of working age were receiving IB; by April 1999, that had risen to 1,276,000. It rose every single year between 1981 and 1999, apart from 1997. In addition, 710,000 women were receiving IB, meaning that at the start of the new millennium, more than two million people of working-age in Britain were defined as ‘unable to work.’

As the authors of the study point out, this increase in ‘incapable’ people was not linked to real health problems; ‘the general standard of health in the population is known to be improving.’ Rather, the rise and rise of the incapacity category from the 1980s to today has occurred in tandem with the routing of trade union militancy by the Thatcher government, the demise of working-class politics, and the subsequent treatment of the unemployed as objects of pity rather than potential fury….

Many claim that successive governments cynically ratcheted up the IB numbers in order to make the overall unemployment figures look better (IB claimants are not officially counted as unemployed). No doubt there’s some truth in that, but more fundamentally the redefinition of much unemployment as incapacity spoke to a shift in the balance of power between organisations that represented workers and the state, and to the demise of class politics and its replacement by new therapeutic relations between the state and the individual. Increasingly, individuals, especially in collapsed industrial towns or areas of poverty, are actively invited by the welfare state to define themselves as pathetic and useless and unable to exist without financial and emotional handouts.

The study he’s citing is "Incapacity Benefit and unemployment," by Christina Beatty and Stephen Fothergill, published in Work to Welfare: How Men Become Detached from the Labour Market (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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A Washington Post-ABC News poll from a couple of days ago has some pretty interesting findings about attitudes toward health care reform.

Among them:

Sixteen percent assume their care will get better if the system is changed while 31 percent figure it’ll get worse. Half think it will stay the same.

Roughly 80 percent of respondents (plus or minus a few points depending on the specific questions) are very or somewhat concerned that health care reform will reduce quality of care and range of coverage while increasing costs and adding to the federal deficit. They think reform will limit choices of doctors and increase government bureaucracy.

About 45 percent of people are somewhat or very satisfied with the overall system, but over 80 percent are very or somewhat satisfied with their own care.

Much more here.

And in case you missed last night’s ABC News health care confab with President Barack Obama, here’s the sort of hardball questions and answers that were on display:

Orrin Devinsky of the NYU School of Medicine wondered if Obama would stick within the limits of government-issue insurance if his wife or one of his daughters was seriously ill and the plan didn’t cover every possible treatment. Obama replied that he would want the "very best care"—but insisted the real issue was that the system is broken. "Understand that the status quo is untenable," he said.

One woman asked if someone like her 105-year-old mom would have care cut simply because of age limits. Obama said he didn’t want that, but that "those decisions are already being made" based on costs and private insurance policies.

He also didn’t answer directly who would set limits to care in a new system, or who would enforce them.

"If we are smart, we should be able to design a system in which people still have choices" and waste is reduced, he said.

More here.

My god, what’s taken us so long to get such a brilliant solutionizer in the White House! He wants not just the best care for his family, but the "very best care." We can get choice and cut waste, if we are smart. Why hasn’t anyone else thought of this? Courage and steel, Obama, courage and steel.

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