Cheap Shots

Ezra Klein is annoyed that John McCain would have the temerity to question the wisdom of universal, government-run health care since hey, he has it! Why isn’t it good enough for everyone else! The objections are “particularly grotesque coming from John McCain, who’s been on government health insurance since the day he was born. Someone should ask him how long he’s had to wait.”

Hm. Well, in the interest of full disclosure I should start off by saying that, as a child, I was under the care of military medicine as my father was in the Air Force. And it’s pretty great.

But I think it’s fair to point out some of the tradeoffs that come with that superior care. There’s having to constantly move your family around, depriving your children of things like “lifelong friendships” and “stability.” There’s the lower pay that officers take on, and the vastly lower pay than enlisted men take on. There’s the constant threat that, y’know, the main breadwinner of the family could be killed in a war defending his or her country. Or he could spend a bunch of years in a Vietnamese prison camp being tortured by his or her country’s enemies.

So yes, McCain has received government run health care his entire life. But maybe that care came with some tradeoffs, and he deserves the superior care. And it might be relevant to consider that, if we tried to provide the same level of care to soldiers (who need to be in absolute peak physical health just to do their jobs and to keep themselves safe), the country would go bankrupt in about six weeks.*

*Six weeks is, of course, a guess. But considering the fact that the military spent $50 billion a year (as of 2005) on health care for members of the military and their immediate families–about 1% of the population–I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a new liability of $5 trillion a year (if my cocktail-napkin math is correct…or even half of that, $2.5 trillion, if it isn’t) could easily bankrupt us in about six weeks.