Megan on Health Care

Megan discusses health care, which means Megan fantasizes about ways to punish the poor for their inherent inferiority.

Imagine if, rather than giving people food stamps, Section 8 vouchers,
welfare payments, public schooling, and so forth, we simply had an incomes
program to boost the wages of those whose productivity is not up to providing
them a basic, decent standard of living?

Is she actually suggesting that the public subsidize businesses?

But that's not all it would do; it would put choice back in the hands of
the consumers. Do poor people want more car and less house? Great;
why not give them that choice if it doesn't cost us anything? They could
even (whisper it) save the money and do something really important with it at a
future date.

Says the woman who just took on a bunch of debt for consumer purchases.

[...Y]ou'll probably end up giving the wastrels less money if they do
fritter it away. Because once you've actually provided people a minimum
income that is adequate to take care of their basic needs, there's no moral
reason not to turn away those who decline insurance from the emergency
rooms. Giving people more choices also means allowing them to live with
the consequences of those choices.

McArdle offers this as an incentive. Imagine the feeling of moral righteousness you can enjoy as you turn away sick people.

No matter what we do to our health care system, it will never much resemble the
cool modernistic dreams of socialist realist fiction, where everything is
effortlessly resolved by smugly serene Agents of the People.

Megan likes to remind her readers that she was taught politeness and she is very civil, unlike other people . If you say the right thing it's the same thing as doing the right thing. (Just ignore the actual digs and insults.)

We are a phenomenally rich nation--the richest in the history of the planet (in
our weight class, anyway). We can afford to paper over the holes with
money.

She's a libertarian, remember.

California and New York are undergoing financial emergencies. The federal government is of course deeply in debt. It will be easy to convince the public that they should be able to keep more of their money instead of paying for medical care and retirement funds for others. Like Megan they'll emphasize choice and responsibility and fairness. And people will die.