Last weekend, Dr. Ben Carson
broadcast a new campaign
infomercial in 22 states titled “A Breath of Fresh Air: A New
Prescription for America.” Concurrent with the Armstrong
Williams-produced
sales pitch, Carson has finally
joined the Republican Party, and
lost his contributor contract with Fox News. The decision won’t
come until April, but Carson is running for president. So what’s
his selling proposition to either big-R Republicans or small-l
libertarians?
Mostly, that he’s a wildly successful
and decorated
pediatric neurosurgeon, with an inspiring rags to riches story,
who became an overnight
conservative sensation after using a
National Prayer Breakfast in February 2013 to
criticize Obamacare in President Barack Obama’s presence. So a
guy who warns against the national debt, preaches individual
responsibility and agency, and has relevant personal experience in
the one policy question that modern Republicans criticize most?
What’s not to like!
Well, a
more thorough search of the political novice’s statements
quickly produces a potential conundrum for a political party
running against Obamacare: Carson has even more antipathy to health
insurance companies than Barack Obama does, and he has previously
advocated policies that look an awful lot like death panels.
In a
2009 interview with the trilingual Web magazine Mega
Diversities, Carson said “The first thing we need to do is
get rid of for profit insurance companies.” Here’s the quote in
context:
What do you need for good health? You need a patient and a
health care provider. Along came a middle man to facilitate
the relationship. Now, the middle has become the principal
entity with the patient and the health care provider at its beck
and call. The entire thing is completely out of
control. The entire concept of for profits for the insurance
companies makes absolutely no sense. “I deny that you need
care and I will make more money”. This is totally
ridiculous. The first thing we need to do is get rid
of for profit insurance companies. We have a lack of
policies and we need to make the government responsible for
catastrophic health care. We have to make the insurance
companies responsible only for routine health care. The fact
that a fraction of the American population has no health care
insurance creates a situation in which some end up in emergency
rooms, which results in even greater expenses for the US. If
insurance companies are responsible only for routine health care,
you are able to predict how much money they are going to need,
which facilitates regulations. For instance, if we didn’t
regulate utilities nobody could afford electricity or water.
You can’t depend on the goodness of people’s hearts, particularly
when you’re dealing with something which is essential.
Even in Carson’s reputation-making National Prayer Breakfast
speech, he launched into his Obamacare section (with its focus on
Health Savings Accounts and consumer-driven decisions) with the
throat-clearing phrase, “We’ve already started down the path to
solving one of the other big problems, health care.”
Now, Carson also said eight months later
at a
Value Voters Summit that “Obamacare is really I think the worst
thing that has happened in this nation since slavery,” so maybe his
positions are evolving. (Conversely, maybe he talks more like a
serially hyperbolic motivational speaker than someone prepared for
the crucible of having his policy statements taken seriously.) In a
June 2014 Megadiversities
interview, Carson distanced himself from the slavery remark,
and put his more recent positioning this way:
I would much prefer to replace the Affordable Care Act with a
program that put healthcare in the hands of the people, and not the
government. […] [W]ith Obamacare, we have a turning over to the
government your most valuable resource, which is what Marxists said
had to happen to change America from a free and open society to
what they call a “utopian society” where the government controls
everything, but no one suffers, at least according to them. What
you do see in every society undergoing a transition of that type is
the development of a small, elite class which controls everything
and lives in total luxury, a rapidly-disappearing middle class, and
a just as rapidly-expanding dependent class. We’re witnessing the
beginning of that phenomenon, and it’s exactly what the
neo-Marxists have prescribed for America. The reason I know about
that is because I’ve spent a great deal of time reading and
understanding what’s going on. This type of transition depends on
the fact that people will not be well-informed and thus easy to
manipulate. What I’ve proposed is a system of healthcare which will
cover all Americans in which no one will be a second-class citizen.
Everyone will have the resources to see whomever they want to see.
But more importantly, it will bring the entire healthcare system
into the free market. That’s what controls quality. That’s what
controls price.
So now we’re
throwing more
Rules for Radicals and The Naked
Communist into the mix, but are we closer to understanding
a throughline on Carson’s health care ideas? In his Prayer
Breakfast speech, he said that his HSA-based plan would mean that
“nobody is talking about death panels” anymore. Which is
interesting, because one of the people in the past who was
talking about concepts that sounded a lot like death
panels was…Ben Carson.
Via an excellent American
Thinker post, here’s an excerpt from a 1996
Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health article from
Carson, entitled “Health Care Reform-A Paradigm Shift”:
The most natural question is, who will pay for catastrophic
health care? The answer: The government-run catastrophic health
care fund. Such a fund would be supported by a mandatory
contribution of 10 to 15 percent of the profits of each health
insurance company, including managed care operations[….]As our general population continues to age and as our technical
abilities continue to improve we will find ourselves in a position
of being able to keep most people alive…well beyond their
100th birthday. The question is “Should we do it simply because we
can? It is well known that up to half of the medical
expenses incurred in the average American’s life are incurred
during the last six months of life….rather than putting them in
an intensive care unit, poking and prodding them, operating and
testing them ad nauseam, why not allow them the dignity of dying in
comfort, at home, with an attendant if
necessary?…Decisions on who should be treated and who
should not be treated would clearly require some national
guidelines[.]
Bolding mine (as it
will be below). In his 2011 book,
America the Beautiful, Carson again talks about seeking
cost-efficiency in the face of human aging:
[H]ow can we provide universal health care in an efficient and
cost-effective way?Compensation has to be fair…compensation cannot be determined
by insurance companies, who make more money by elbowing their way
in as the middleman and confiscating as much of the transaction
between patient and caregiver as they can. […]When a society faces major changes, such as drastically
increased life expectancy, its people should examine the effects of
such a change and make logical, appropriate adjustments…we
should…devise compassionate methods of easing the burden of aging
both on the individual and the family.I can hear some people screaming after reading this that
I am advocating for “death panels”….some people like to
put forth terms like this because they stir up emotional
responses.
Another potential sticking point among both Republicans and
libertarians are Carson’s stated beliefs emanating from his Seventh
Day Adventist faith. Now, I for one am always pleased when a
potential presidential candidate becomes part of mainstreaming a
newer and frequently disfavored religion, and I generally don’t
care if people (let alone politicians) believe in creationism, even
the strict version that Carson emphatically defends in this
2013 interview (“If they want to criticize the fact that I
believe in a literal, six-day creation, let’s have at it”). The
man’s faith certainly didn’t hinder his ability to separate the craniums
of conjoined infants, after all.
But what’s concerning to me is Carson’s
prejudices against those of us who do not share his beliefs. Take
this
2004 interview with Adventist Review:
Ultimately, if you accept the evolutionary theory, you dismiss
ethics, you don’t have to abide by a set of moral codes, you
determine your own conscience based on your own desires. You have
no reason for things such as selfless love, when a father dives in
to save his son from drowning. You can trash the Bible as
irrelevant, just silly fables, since you believe that it does not
conform to scientific thought. You can be like Lucifer, who said,
“I will make myself like the Most High.” […]By believing we are the product of random acts, we eliminate
morality and the basis of ethical behavior. For if there is no such
thing as moral authority, you can do anything you want. You make
everything relative, and there’s no reason for any of our higher
values.
In addition to being prejudicial and factually suspect, this
kind of slippery-slope-on-steroids argument–taking you from
“evolutionary theory” to “Lucifer” in just 73 words!–translates far
too easily into public policy that adversely affects those on the
other side of his faith. Carson’s opposition to gay marriage
springs from an openly stated fear that the “neo-Marxists” are
trying to undermine the very bedrock of America’s uniquely
successful project by changing the definition of family.
It was not entirely a slip of the tongue when Carson told Sean
Hannity in March 2013:
My thoughts are that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s
a well-established fundamental pillar of society and no group, be
they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in
bestiality, it doesn’t matter what they are, they don’t get to
change the definition.
Though he later
apologized, the sentiment behind the quote remains; now he just
says that gay-marriage advocates are
basically “a new group of mathematicians who say 2 + 2 is
five.”
Carson is arguably a larger
figure within Seventh Day Adventism than Mitt Romney has been with
Mormonism. (Or at least, Carson was, until he became such
a high-profile political figure, which has led to some wings of the
church urging more of an arm’s-length posture.) Ex-Adventist
friends tell me of church gatherings where the prize at the end of
the meeting was to shake the great orator’s hand and get a signed
copy of one his motivational books.
As
Advent Truth Ministries pointed out earlier this month,
the “one aspect of Dr. Carson’s identity that has thus far evaded
scrutiny is his religion.” And what would that scrutiny
reveal?
[T]here is one element of his beloved religion that would
certainly pose a challenge to the electorate, and perhaps obstacle,
to his presidential ambition, i.e. his church’s
Eschatology (View of end-time events).According to Seventh-day Adventist theology, this very
America, which Dr. Ben is so passionate about
improving, will form an alliance with the Roman Catholic
Papacy, one that will deprive Americans and others around the world
of their highly cherished Civil and Religious Liberties.
Specifically, the Seventh-day Adventist church teaches that this
alliance of America and the Papacy will force the world to honor
Sunday as a sacred day of rest and worship in opposition to
lovingly and voluntarily allowing men and women to choose the Bible
Sabbath which it believes God ordains. The church believes
that this controversy will ultimately develop into a tectonic
struggle of apocalyptic proportions in which millions will be
killed who do not go along with the requirements of the
alliance’s call for Sunday sacredness (Revelation Ch. 13). Many
believe that this alliance is being formed before our very
eyes.
I am a religious pluralist and longtime fan of the Book of
Revelations, so this kind of stuff doesn’t trouble me much. But
it’s it at least worth asking how Carson’s eschatological notions
color his view of current and near-future events.
Real Clear Politics this week ran the
headline “Ben
Carson Making Case to Be Taken Seriously in 2016;” the
Bloomberg Politics respectful
cover line was “Ben Carson’s Longshot Presidential Bid Suddenly
Looks a Lot More Realistic.” He has been given policy real estate
in
National Review, and had his charity hyped by
Breitbart News.
In presupposing the seriousness of his candidacy, Republicans
and other supporters are declaring ready for prime time a man
considerably less experienced than the current naif in the White
House; a man who plays fast and
loose with the Nazi analogies, who has warned darkly as
recently as seven weeks ago that President Obama
might just cancel the 2016 elections, and who maintains a
hard-to-pin view on Obamacare reform that involves open hostility
to the very existence of private insurance companies. Are
conservatives really ready for a 2016 presidential who, when
talking about late-life health care, sounds more like
Ezekiel Emanuel than Sarah Palin? The first step is to look
behind the gilded oration and Iowa networking, and try to
understand what the man actually thinks.
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