Steve Laffey, Health Savings Accounts, and Conservatism, Part 2

Healthcare reform is necessary in this country not just because of the current system’s fiscal insanity. It's necessary because our present healthcare delivery system disrupts a fundamental connection in society – the relationship between healer and patient. While our leaders and the public in general weren’t paying nearly enough attention, laws were put into place that allowed insurance companies and government bureaucracies to insert themselves far too agressively between doctors and patients.

The bureaucratization of healthcare has consequences that reach beyond budgetary effects. The bureaucratization of healthcare contributes to a general feeling of insecurity in American society. Will I be able to go to my doctor tomorrow, if some bureaucrat decides to change the rules? Even if a doctor wants to treat me, will the insurance company allow him to? If some intermediary makes an improper decision, is there any chance of reversing it?

When individuals start feeling that too much of their lives have come under the control of distant, unaccountable actors -- and there's nothing more important to controlling your life than maintaining your health -- they despair about their ability to help themselves. And to help them where they feel they can't help themselves, people start demanding that government seize more power to try to fix things. But as government accumulates more power, it becomes inevitably less accountable, eventually becoming just another meddling intermediary.

HSA’s, which allow people to begin to seek medical treatment without obtaining permission from some remote third party partially motivated by something other than a desire to heal, help eliminate this insecurity. In doing so, they break the cycle driving society towards a mechanistic regime of government-controlled medical decision making.

By endorsing HSA’s Steve Laffey has presented a policy consistent with a humanistic conservatism that is cognizant of the fact that what good government does comes from building upon -- not replacing -- the relationships between and the innovation of individuals. Laffey's energy policy is based on the same idea. My hope is that we will to continue to see this theme as the Mayor presents his policy proposals in other areas and that Mayor Laffey himself, eventually, will spend some time directly explaining its importance.