Debate on Universal Health Insurance: What Place for Anecdotes?
posted by Frank Pasquale
Tomorrow I’ll be debating the Chairman of the Cato Institute, Dr. William A. Niskanen, on the topic of universal health insurance. (Thanks to the Seton Hall Federalists and ACS for putting this together.) We’ll be discussing the following issues:
I. Is there a health care crisis in US and what are the primary factors contributing to it?
II. Is the universal provision of heath insurance by the government a legally and economically feasible solution?
III. Are there alternative solutions addressing the health care crisis that are superior to the universal provision of health insurance by the government?
It’s a real honor to be debating Dr. Niskanen, since I read parts of his 1971 classic Bureaucracy and Representative Government back in grad school.
In preparing for a debate like this, I always wonder what should be the balance between empirical evidence and anecdotes. While the former is the “gold standard” in written publications, the latter often represent the best opportunity to bring home the urgency of a given policy position. Catonian David Hyman has claimed that mere “narratives provide an inadequate basis for [the] framing and resolution of matters of social policy.” But as advocates at Health Care for All and Health Law Advocates pointed out at a recent luncheon at Harvard’s Petrie-Flom center, even the finest “economic policy and theory” needs to be questioned if its prescriptions leave “millions with inadequate health coverage.”
In any event, I plan to lead with anecdotes like the recent Oregon health insurance lottery and the Sixty Minutes story on Americans waiting hours for doctor-volunteers originally dispatched to the third world. But I most look forward to developing the moral and economic case for universal insurance–the neglect of which leaves the US increasingly out of step with norms of solidarity and mutual concern overwhelmingly prevalent in the developed world.
March 4, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Posted in: Health Law
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Responses (1)
Daniel Goldberg - March 5, 2008 at 1:19 am
I wish I could be there. The 2006 anthology of the “Narrative Matters” column in Health Affairs (published by JHU Press, I believe?) goes into the relevance of stories for health policy.
Might I also suggest that this is a particularly good opportunity — we’re discussing stories, after all — to engage some of the medical humanists and narrative theorists on the signficance of stories and health?
I am biased, heh. Best of luck. If anyone is archiving it on a webcast, let me know.
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