Nationalized Healthcare? (Part 4): Wise regulation as a part of the solution

There is a stream of thought within conservative political philosophy that is suspicious of any government regulation of businesses. But whereas we should carefully consider the proper limits to the government (as previously discussed on this blog), and should challenge the government to not go beyond these limits, the role of government as one that preserves justice by prohibiting, preventing, prosecuting, and punishing injustice cannot be limited to private individuals but must extend to the actions of corporations as well. As the founding fathers of our country, recognizing the sinfulness of Man as taught in the Bible, set up a system of checks and balances within the government so that power could not be consolidated within one branch of government, leading to despotism, so the government itself must at times provide a check against corporations or industries, which are also led and managed by sinful individuals, and which can execute grave injustices against the national population.

To give an example of proper government regulation of private corporations: consider the Food and Drug Administration. When the industrial revolution fully impacted agriculture and food became mass-produced and marketed not just regionally, but nationally, some corporations began taking advantage of the situation and they began putting all kinds of non-food "fillers" in the ingredients of the food-stuffs they were marketing. (When earning my history degree, I remember reading an old newspaper article printed during the time when government regulation of food production was being debated; those supporting such regulation wrote a poem that started with the line, "Things aren't always what they seem, they give us paste instead of cream.") Few today would argue that there should be no FDA and that the government should keep its hands off the food industry: people are too worried about eating tubercular beef or paste in their cream to make such arguments.

Government regulation, wisely done, may be an important part of resolving the healthcare concerns that confront our nation. Government regulation may take the form of antitrust investigations and litigation against insurance companies in some markets. Government regulation would certainly address the problem of "rescissions," or retroactive denials of healthcare coverage by which people pay for insurance they never receive.

The kind of government regulation that I am attempting to argue for could be done through the office of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice; it would not necessarily involve the creation of a new regulatory agency. I believe that such regulation could address many of the concerns people have without anything like the massive increase in debt that would be incurred in the current plan before Congress, and I think that such regulation takes seriously the proper role of government as the administrator of justice.