The Illusion of Individual Responsibility

All the rhetoric right now, from all directions, proclaims that our healthcare system is broken. Fine. But, in reality, our bodies are broken, not our healthcare system. Fix our bodies and you fix our healthcare system. Period. It's that simple. The goal of a health care system, anyways, is to improve, maintain, and preserve people's health. But, that is not happening, and it is not happening because most of our personal health decisions occur outside of the healthcare system: in our homes, at our places of work, in our local restaurants, and within other local ecologies. These are the places where our bodies mend, break, and, hopefully, flourish--not, for the most part, in hospitals, clinics, and other medical buildings. 

With this prelude, I want to highlight a comment made to my previous post; it illustrates the Illusion of Individual Responsibility well:

I think a free market health care system would be best as it would shift most of the burden of paying costs to the unhealthy (although some people are unhealthy because of genetic diseases, most unhealthy people are so from choices). Whereas universal health care is basically just a big subsidization of unhealthy behavior that transfers wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy. It will eventually break down and cost controlling measures like sin taxes and mandatory this and that where people are being controlled like puppets will take place.

Ultimately, I don't think poor health is a societal problem, per say, just so long as the unhealthy are paying for their own treatments. It's your own body, do what you will with it.

I agree that attacking wealth and income inequality via healthcare is not effective--this social challenge needs a more holistic approach--but the reality remains that we will, inevitably, bail out the healthcare system in a manner analogous to how we just bailed out our financial system. As Nassim Taleb says, "If you have to bail out, nationalize." Thus, nationalizing health insurance--but it must truly be insurance, not prepaid healthcare--would allow for catastrophic coverage to be a socialized cost (as would occur during a health system collapse anyway). If nationalized health insurance were purely catastrophic, with high deductibles scaled according to income, then people would bear the risk and burden of their daily lifestyle choices because they would have to pay out-of-pocket for most (>80%) of their health services throughout their lives. In this system, there would be an incentive to stay healthy. If you have a cold, pay the doctor cash, credit card, etc. Don't file an insurance claim. A cold is a non-insurable event. 

Total top-down control suffers from the illusion of control, but the illusion of individual responsibility is important as well. The illusion of individual responsibility emerges when we construct social systems that purport to hold people accountable for their actions, but, when things collapse, they end up bailing people out, thus nullifying their claims about individual responsibility because the costs are ultimately socialized. We all, in the end, bear the costs. The illusion of individual responsibility tempers certain ideological perspectives. It sounds good on paper, just as top-down reforms from on high (Obama's magic wand, for instance) sound good on paper as well. However, in reality, we must simply find ways to heal our bodies, not our healthcare system. Our healthcare system is stretched too thin, unable to provide the resources necessary to care for people's health problems, because our bodies, collectively, are too broken. 

Fix our bodies and you fix our healthcare system.

That's the goal, right, to achieve health?