Clintonites seem overzealous in claiming moral high ground - Bill Clinton's accusation of greed in the medical private sector as part of his sales pitch for health care reform - The Last Word - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 1, 1993 | by Richard Starr

There he goes again. In his health care address - essentially a sales pitch for one of the largest government power grabs in U.S. history - President Clinton was unable to resist pronouncing the G-word, greed. "Our health care " he intoned, "is too uncertain and too expensive, too bureaucratic and too wasteful. It has too much fraud and too much greed."

That the expense, bureaucracy, fraud and waste of the current health system is overwhelmingly associated with programs our government already runs is a subject for another day.

What interests me here is the G-word; specifically, its transformation at the hands of Clinton, his wife and fellow power-hungry liberals into an all-purpose slur against those who make profits in the private sector.

Like ethics, greed is a word that liberals use promiscuously. The reason in both cases is the same: As the party of the public sector, they arrogantly believe they are also the party of virtue. Only Republicans, the party of the private sector, can have ethics problems. And only rich Republicans (they believe) are greedy.

It would be one thing if the moral posturing of those who sling the G-word was simply a cynical political ploy to incite and take advantage of class resentment. Politics, after all, is about winning. But the appalling thought occurs that when the Clintons talk about greed (she started it this past spring by denouncing pharmaceutical companies), they are sincere.

The immediate consequence of imputing moral blame to their political opponents is to distort beyond all recognition the realities of American health care. Writer Evelyn Waugh, in one of his famously cruel gibes, remarked on his friend Randolph Churchill's loss of a lung that turned out not to be cancerous: It was a "typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it." The Clintons seem to be aiming for a similar triumph with American health care - still the envy of the world in many respects - by removing choice and quality in favor of bureaucracy and price controls.

Don't take my word for it. Alain Enthoven, once widely cited as the guru behind the Clinton initiative, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 7 that the proposed health alliance "threatens to be a monopolistic, regulatory government agency that will cause more problems than it solves." And Enthoven, no doubt, is being polite, out of deference to the many friends and followers who worked on the proposal. He goes on: "Big and powerful Health Alliances that cover most of the population look suspiciously like a government-controlled single-payer system. This may be the intention ..."

Only sincere hostility to the profit-making private sector can explain the underlying intention of the Clinton plan - to stealthily nationalize our medical and health industry. Because unless you are wearing ideological blinders, it's impossible to look at our health care system and not see through the flaws to its many virtues.

Compare our system with any in the world and what shines through is not greed, fraud and selfishness but charity, service and philanthrophy. Herewith a short and selective list of private, typically American efforts in the field of health care, lest the Clinton propaganda machine overwhelm you with rhetoric about how morally otiose capitalists are.

The famously greedy Rockefeller family almost single-handedly launched the teaching of modern medical science in privately endowed research universities. Religious Americans - Catholics, Jews, Protestants - gave generously to build hundreds of charitable hospitals across the country and continue to give generously to them. Despite abuses, America's unique marriage of charity and capitalist innovation - witness the telethon and direct mail - has brought in untold millions in small donations for medical research. As I say, this is a short and selective list. But once you begin thinking in this vein, the examples multiply.

Interestingly, the 1980s, labeled by liberals as the decade of greed, could with more justice to the facts be called the decade of philanthropy. Economist Richard B. McKenzie, among others, has detailed how charitable giving by individuals grew at an annual rate of 5.1 percent throughout the 1980s (the trend between 1955 and 1980 was 3.1 percent growth).

I'm not sure, though, that such facts matter to those, such as our president, who reflexively identify government with virtue.

If such is your disposition, then private philanthropy is simply guilt money paid by the greedy so they can sleep at night. The amazing early-century achievements in health and medicine of the Rockefeller charities were merely a lamentable necessity in that antique era before enlightened big government began shouldering its proper responsibilities.

Seen in this light, the 1980s were indeed a decade of greed. Because greed, as the party of government defines it, has nothing to do with personal character. It is defined, rather, as a political disposition hostile to government spending. Generosity, by the same token, is defined as the willingness of citizens to donate ever greater portions of their income, via taxes, to the benevolent government. The most exalted moral agents in this scheme of things - conveniently enough for our self-satisfied first couple - are those who give their lives meaning by redistributing other people's money.