Jim Prevor considers whether conservatives haven’t missed the bigger picture on health-care reform. He writes:

So much of the argument against Obamacare is presented on prudential grounds—it is too expensive, the budget is too high, people will lose the chance to go the doctor they prefer, etc. Yet the bigger argument is that if you give people guarantees of material things—food, shelter, health care—regardless of how they behave, then more people will behave irresponsibly.

There is a whole literature out there on how welfare, subsidized housing, food stamps, and Medicaid all helped to diminish the importance of low wage earning men in their own eyes and the eyes of their family. Poor working men, who were once the best chance a family had, suddenly were superfluous; thus the explosion of children growing up without their fathers at home.

Now Obamacare promises to make breadwinners less important to all families–that is unlikely to encourage more responsible behavior among the citizenry.

It is worthwhile to ask why conservatives, who are supposed to be conserving values and not just the free market, aren’t making this case more often and more rigorously. It is perhaps not hard to figure out why. Politicians, even devoted conservatives, often get lured into the contest of “giving away goodies.” Obama has lots of them, the most extravagant being free or highly subsidized health care with no taxes. (There won’t be many jobs, but that’s a different problem.)  So conservatives play along. “We have goodies too—less expensive and more effective!” And who wants to be a scold, lecturing his constituents about the dangers of getting something for nothing?

We therefore have paid insufficient attention to the question of whether “free” is better. Encouraging everyone to overuse virtually free services is in part what got us into the fix we are in. Now, there have been many conservative proposals (contrary to what Obama would have us believe)  to address a key underlying  factor in rising health-care costs—namely that the payer and the consumer are not the same, so the consumer isn’t inclined to watch the bottom line.  But conservatives have been making this an economic argument, contending that individual purchase of insurance will help contain costs. Prevor reminds us that there are moral and social components as well.

At a time when the president is offering mounds of freebies for seemingly no cost, perhaps there is room for another perspective, which not only comports with reality but also with the values we want to promote.