Problem-Solution: Health Care Reform

Health care reformers advocating the public option have stated the problem this way: health care is a right and not a privilege.

Empirically, it is necessary to clearly identify the hypothesis to be tested.

Is health care being "a right and not a privilege" a testable hypothesis?

Of course not. That is largely why the problem, and the solution, tends to be framed in a political, qualitatively normative way.

To test the normative hypothesis, there has to be a way to measure the change.

If the problem is to make health care more affordable, and thus the measure of verification is how many people receive health care because they can afford it, the problem (the hypothesis) is strongly stated in a clearly verifiable way--financed from the consumer up, not the top down.

Alternatively, the problem is weakly stated as "a right and not a privilege" because the objective (the teleology of the argument) is to rig the price without really making it more affordable. How much wealth is accumulated and consolidated--the real measure of affordability-- is not the hypothesis to be tested. Consolidation of wealth and power then has the moral--the normative--force, or strength, of the argument. The cause of the problem is falsely confirmed to be the right thing to do by a process of validation.

Taxing the value added to health care and returning the revenue to fund a free and unconsolidated marketplace is the testable solution. Not only may health care be affordably provided, but free of political (gamma risk) manipulation verified from the bottom up. It is something that can be clearly measured or verified with a strong immunity to the anachronism of pure rhetorical artifice.

The normative argument "right and not privilege" can be rendered a verifiable hypothesis from the bottom up. A person participates with the full capacity for an exchange of value: with the disinflationary capacity to demand or not demand rather than just the aggregate inflationary pressure, and the deflationary consequence, of a massively monetized insurance policy.

Monetizing in the aggregate from the top down, rathering than empowering the consumer, serves to ensure providers get rich enough to retire at fifty, causing a shortage of doctors instead of creating the incentive to add supply in a profitable market.

Rendering the normative argument a verifiable hypothesis from the bottom up provides an effective means of controlling costs instead of consolidating wealth and causing the crises that deprives affordability of goods and services. Deprivation in the name of natural right over privilege is a ruse of days gone by.

Empirics is the order of the day, not the same old rhetorical tricks of the normative trade. Just like when the monarch claimed to be the absolute arbitor of what is righteous and good, favoring the republican form of government over real and directly verifiable democratic solutions to our problems is an anachronism.

The elitist model, with clearly verifiable deprivational qualities, is clearly passe'. The absolute is obsolete when reform is in demand.

The organizational typology is the strong predictor of the probable outcome, not partisan rhetoric and duopolistic schemas that innovatively reinvent the problem as the solution in the guise of the empirical process of continuous improvement.

To explain the necessity of centralizing the market in the name of reform (making health care a right and not a privilege), the medical profession is said to be over-specialized and too expensive. The result is a system of rationing that deprives the right to goods and services, rendering health care a class commodity--an emblem of status or privilege. Depriving people of what they need is categorically wrong.

While the normative sentiment is veritably agreeable, it is not verifiably rigorous considering that consolidation of power into the privilege of conferring it, rather than democratically sharing it, is the problem, not the solution.

The solution is not to confer the privilege, but to democratically ensure the right to freely participate in a way that maximizes a person's individual utility which, in turn, determines the profitability of the health care providers and insurers, not the other way around.