Odd Citizen
An Odd Citizen’s Search For Vanishing Freedoms

Nov

21

On Breast Cancer, Unemployment and Warfare

Filed Under Suggestions, Uncategorized

The hoopla about breast cancer screening recommendations masks a basic and important difference between private health and “public health.”

The public health people study health in terms of statistics. If a test saves one life in a thousand but costs everyone who takes the test $100, then one life is lost but at a cost of $100,000. It may be someone’s logical conclusion that the risk of one life isn’t worth the overall expense of all those tests.

Taking the same example from a private health viewpoint, each of these 1,000 people might consider $100 a small price to pay for early detection of a life threatening disease, or the reassurance of knowing they are healthy.

What we are seeing in the socialized health care bills in congress is the attempt to define health care in the “public health” mode. So the government’s “Preventative Service Task Force” recommends fewer tests while individual doctors recommend the private health alternative. If the Democrats have their way by shoving socialized medicine down our throats a lot of people will die based on rationing due to the public health approach. In fact, pages 1150 and 1189-1190 of the senate bill specify that this same committee’s recommendations will be used to provide or withhold health services.

Unfortunately, this kind of public statistical vs. individual approach applies to all too many if not most of the things government does. The public approach to reducing unemployment, for example, is based on statistical aggregates, the rate of unemployment and tries to bludgeon the rate down. But statistical rates don’t bludgeon. They are aggregates of individual conditions. And it is only at the individual level that the aggregates such as the unemployment rate can be changed.

Even where we assume that an aggregate is needed to get things done it isn’t true. An army is an aggregate. You send an army to fight your enemies, but the fighting is done by individual soldiers, not by “the army” or even by generals. A good general occupies himself primarily with the task of making sure his soldiers have the wherewithal, including his best strategic judgment to beat the enemy. But the general and the army don’t kill the enemy, the soldiers do.

This all seems simple and sensible to me. Health, employment, economic growth, conservation, even warfare are individual efforts without which nothing much gets done.

“Public Health” is a health hazard.

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