Medicare Meets Mephistopheles

That's the title of a 2006 Cato Institute rip on Medicare. Here's the spin, via Amazon: "Let's say you're the devil, and you want to corrupt the American republic. How would you go about it? According to David Hyman, you might create something like Medicare, the federal health care program for the elderly. Hyman submits that Medicare may be the greatest trick the devil ever played. Medicare feeds on the avarice of doctors and other providers, turns seniors into health care gluttons, and makes regions of the United States green with envy over the dollars showered on other regions... With epic political battles over Medicare and the future of limited government looming just over the horizon, Hyman uses satire to cast a critical eye on this mediocre government program."

You can pick upMedicare Meets Mephistopheles, for $1.40 from Amazon or $14.95 from Cato. Your choice as a consumer in a market that actually works - unlike the free-market healthcare biz. The New England Journal of Medicine had a January 2007 review:

Hyman is surely correct that current financial trends in Medicare funding are unsustainable and will eventually erode public support. But in focusing on Medicare's inadequacies and mocking the system as an intergenerational scam (my word, not his), Hyman overlooks the reason why Medicare was enacted in the first place and why it retains considerable public support. At its inception, Medicare addressed the palpable medical needs of the elderly and the failure of the private insurance market to meet those needs. The program reflected a set of values and social commitments that included universalism, government responsibility for social welfare, and public accountability.

More important, Hyman ignores the reality that many of Medicare's flaws are at least rivaled, and perhaps exceeded, in the private sector. It is doubtful that the private sector would match Medicare's considerable strengths in providing access to health care that was unavailable before the program was introduced. Whatever its failures, there is evidence that the program has clearly improved the lives of its intended beneficiaries. As J. Lubitz and colleagues wrote in Health Affairs ("Three Decades of Health Care Use by the Elderly, 1965–1998") in 2001, "Our findings are consistent with the idea that Medicare-funded services have improved the health of the elderly." Is there any legitimate nonideological reason to believe that consumer-driven health care will better serve the elderly than Medicare? I am dubious.

Still, Hyman's bracing critique reflects the fact that neither Medicare's problems nor the ascendancy of market-based approaches to solving them can be ignored any longer. In an era of rampant individualism, the attempt to defend Medicare's collective ethos has the aura of a reactionary battle waged to save an old order in the midst of its last throes. Those who support the social obligations underlying Medicare must demonstrate anew why market-based solutions are unappealing and why governmental investment in health care is morally justified.

Here's hoping that Obama means new hope for social obligations.