I met a girl named Emma at the Ugly Mug. She is a recently graduated health policy professional from Brown graduate school and finding her way around D.C. for the first week in her new home. She’s from Massachusetts and educated in New Hampshire, so I was happy to have such a fervent red sox fan to watch the game with. They lost a close one that should have been a win, but between the beer, the best quesadilla I’ve ever had, great music and conversation…I’d say it was a salvageable night. talking to someone who has made it their job to know about public health policy was very cool. She was aware of all the arguments against national/socialized health care that I had heard or could come up with and had very convincing arguments as to why each one lacked reason and substance. For the most part, she was able to provide credible examples of policies that would properly incentivize doctors, properly incentivize patients, and provide high quality care to anyone who would need it. These examples were not just abstract ideas or policies that have been implemented overseas but rather ideas that have proven successful around this country. To boil the main arguments against socialized medicine down to three bullet points may be unfair, but I haven’t heard any that can’t be put under the following headings

1) The government can’t run such a large system as efficiently as a private system, therefore costs will only go up
2) If we socialize something, quality will go down
3) By giving governmental entitlements, people lose the will and drive to succeed and contribute to society

That last argument is the most enraging because it is patently false. There is no real evidence of this being true and people who drag out examples of ‘welfare queens’ and other tired falsehoods from the political fights of the 1990s only do a disservice to their own argument by trying to go there. Are there people who abuse the current system? Yes. Will there be people who will abuse any system? Yes. Will we all be better off if everyone has their basic needs met in a fiscally responsible system? Also yes.

The second argument, of quality going down, is mystifying. While systems of national health care outside the U.S. gained early reputations for inefficiency and poor quality, this does not necessarily still ring true. Early kinks in those early systems were to be expected and have, for the most part, been ironed out. The result of national health care in Canada, Sweden and France has been a higher quality of life for their citizens. That sounds like a pretty good outcome to me. I think American ingenuity has proven itself to be a force to be reckoned with in the past century and we can use that creativity to come up with a system that is efficient and affordable. At the end of the day with this issue, it just seems like opponents of a national system are all to often upper middle class individuals who haven’t felt the economic sting of the problems we face. With no real plans to fix the system and no ideas for a new one, the arguers against national health care seem to be doing nothing more than arguing over the price of their garden hose…..while their neighbor’s house burns.