Misguided idea of freedom
Many factors have brought about the welcome failure of efforts thus far to repeal or replace Obamacare. But one factor should get more attention than it has: The deeply wrong notion of “freedom” that is the primary ethical motivation behind the repeal efforts.
Cases in point: One recent failed bill was called the Consumer Freedom Option; another was called the Health Care Freedom Act.
To see what’s wrong with this libertarian notion of freedom, it’s important first to see what’s right with it: Its assumption that human beings are free and responsible.
Apart from communist dead-enders and a few neuroscientists who think there are absolute physical explanations for everything, pretty much everyone rightly assumes that human beings are free and responsible. It’s important to recognize the great moral good of living in a society that holds that freedom is to be respected and not curtailed except when absolutely necessary. But from this unproblematic starting point, libertarianism makes several fatal errors. The primary error is the disconnection of freedom from purposes, consequences — and people. In this error, freedom is just my capacity to choose and being able to choose something like a bare-bones insurance plan or no insurance at all is the all-but absolute moral good at stake in the health care debate. In that view, Obamacare is unfair because it violates this sacrosanct freedom to choose. Moreover, this way of thinking continues, my exercise of choice to pick a plan or no plan has nothing to do with anyone other than me. That’s true even if my health takes a surprising turn for the worse and I need to start freeloading on the system as my significant health care costs outstrip the benefits of my bare-bones policy. And, by the way, it’s unfair — because I’m free and responsible and take good care of myself — to stick me in an insurance pool with the sick. Make them pay their own way. They’re probably at fault for their ailment anyhow. But insurance pools don’t unjustly compromise our freedom and compel the healthy to subsidize the sick. Such pools amount to an economic recognition of an interdependent human society. We really are connected to each other, even outside the confines of our families, and the greatest efficiencies in the health insurance market follow from linking our freedom to choose to the fate of everyone else in the insurance pool.
Another libertarian error is that the capacity for freedom of anyone is equated with the capacity for freedom of a so-called rugged individualist (usually a male, white, middle-class-to-wealthy person). In the mythical world of such an individual, freedom is an exercise of the pure power of volition without the assistance of anyone or anything. The chief enemies of such freedom are bad moral character and big government. Bodily burdens — like chronic disease, social constraints, lung-damaging poor air quality — play little to no role in this way of thinking about freedom.
Such hubris about freedom doesn’t necessarily lead to contempt for the situations endured by others. But that’s often what happens: The great enemies of the republic become the unemployed who need food stamps and the desperately poor who need Medicaid (with some racial animus thrown in to make this a really toxic brew).
Misplaced pride about freedom — I did it all by myself: Why the hell can’t others do the same? — blinds one to the vulnerability of others.
“Freedom” in an American political context is a potent word. But it has proved an unsuccessful battle cry in the health care debate because the notion of freedom invoked by the opponents of Obamacare is deeply incorrect. This empty freedom is a sign of our times that, as political scientist Mark Lilla put it, “begins with basic liberal principles — the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, distrust of public authority … and advances no further.”