State Health Care Is Evil

National Help for Satan

It is surprising – and a little disheartening – when we realise how much the modern statalist mentality has bamboozled us into believing that what is deeply wrong can actually be right, because seen as both normal and inevitable. When we have attained a solid Catholic formation we must then, if we are logical, realise that this is not the case.

Let us take health care as an example.

Most Europeans consider it fully normal that health care be a duty of the central government. This is, obviously, because they have never known any other system; and also because they have been led to believe, by the omnipresent statalist mentality, that they would die in a ditch among the indifference of the passers-by if this were not the case. Note here a fundamental trait of statalism: the godless belief in the absence of charity, mutual help, or love of neighbour. Therefore, Nanny must intervene to protect us from ourselves, in pretty much everything, at all times.

This way, charity goes out the window. Its place is taken by a mentality of forced expropriation, which then becomes good because it forces the ruthless savages to provide for each other. Similarly, but from the other end of the equation, a mentality of entitlement is formed. Most people in Europe genuinely believe that they have a right that the Country at large provides for them. No, says the Church, they haven't! Those who have more have a private duty to charitably help those who are in need; but those who are in need have no individual right to receive such help; rather, they accept with gratitude the help offered to them; help extended not because they are entitled to it, but because of love of neighbour born out of the love of God; which is, exactly, what charity means.

The difference between help provided and accepted in charity and an entitlement mentality is like the difference between day and night. Self-responsibility is rejected in favour of the demand that others be made responsible for oneself. Self-organisation is rejected in favour of self-incapacitation. Subsidiarity is ditched for statalism. The principle of entitlement opens the door to a huge confectionery, out of which the arrogantly self-entitled, willingly self-incapacitated man will try to get as much sweets and cakes as he can, by the by demanding Nanny's help once he has become obscenely obese.

There was no National Health Service in the Papal States. There were countless institutions, both religious and lay, who provided charitable work, financed by the charity of people of every class. There were societies of mutual help providing a charitable net inside a community of like minded people. There were strong, extended families providing the same net on a smaller scale. There was, finally, a deeply felt conscience that self-responsibility come first, and is the foundation of all the rest. To the one that does not want to work, you will not give anything to eat.

In Italian there is a word, or an intimation, often used to express this concept of self-responsibility, and which has no easy translation able to render all the depth of its meaning: Arrangiati! You might translate it in English with “(deal with it and) do what you have to do!”, but the genius is in saying it all with one word.

State health care is evil. It promotes the very destruction of charity and its substitution with entitlement mentality and her evil brother, Socialism. We Europeans must all make a conscious effort of re-examining institutions that seem part of our “normality” and reflect whether this normality is not – as in the case of health care it certainly is – pathology.

M