noted. 09/15/2011

• Why libertarianism fails in health care - The Washington Post

  • Health-care services are somewhat unique in that they’re a rare form of consumption that you often get and get charged for, even if you haven’t asked for them. If you collapse on a street, an ambulance will rush you to a hospital. If you get into a car accident, you’ll wake up in intensive care. If you start suffering from dementia, your family will ask the doctors to help you.

    Perhaps you would have preferred that it was otherwise. Perhaps you believe so deeply in personal responsibility that you would sacrifice your life to demonstrate that individuals must suffer for their bad decisions. But it may not be up to you, and whether you get billed or your family gets billed or society gets billed, someone will pay the bill.

    It’s all well and good to say personal responsibility is the bedrock of liberty, but even the hardest of libertarians has always understood that there are places where your person ends and mine begins. Generally, we think of this in terms of violent intrusion or property transgressions. But in health care, it has to do with compassion.

  • We are a decent society, and we do not want to look in people’s pockets for an insurance card when they fall to the floor with chest pains. If we’re not going to look in their pockets, however, we need some answer for who pays when they wake up — or, God forbid, after they stop breathing — in the hospital. And though it sounds nice to say that charities will pick up the slack, any hospital system in America will tell you that even with Medicare and Medicaid assuming much of the burden for the most intractable and expensive cases, charities are not capable of or interested in fully compensating the medical system for the services needed by the un- or underinsured.

• Instead of attacking WikiLeaks, fix what it exposed - Stripes - Independent U.S. military news from Iraq, Afghanistan and bases worldwide

  • Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was right when he suggested that the WikiLeaks revelations were “embarrassing” and “awkward.” But his assessment — and that of so many other government officials — stems from the magnitude of what he left unsaid.

    These revelations are not merely embarrassing. They also contain evidence of government actions and policies that are an abuse of power and that violate international human-rights standards to which we as Americans are committed.

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