Rugged Individualism

Here's Roger Cohen's (NYT) take on the health-care debate:

Whatever may be right, something is rotten in American medicine. It should
be fixed. But fixing it requires the acknowledgment that, when it comes to
health, we’re all in this together. Pooling the risk between everybody is the
most efficient way to forge a healthier society.
Europeans have no problem
with this moral commitment. But Americans hear “pooled risk” and think, “Hey,
somebody’s freeloading on my hard work.”

A reader, John Dowd, sent me this comment: “In Europe generally the
populace in the various countries feels enough sense of social connectedness to
enforce a social contract that benefits all, albeit at a fairly high cost. In
America it is not like that. There is endless worry that one’s neighbor may be
getting more than his or her “fair” share.”

Post-heroic European societies, having paid in blood for violent
political movements born of inequality and class struggle, see greater risk in
unfettered individualism than in social solidarity. Americans, born in revolt
against Europe and so ever defining themselves against the old Continent’s
models, mythologize their rugged (always rugged) individualism as the bulwark
against initiative-sapping entitlements. We’re not talking about health here.
We’re talking about national narratives and mythologies — as well as money.
These are things not much susceptible to logic. But in matters of life and
death, mythology must cede to reality, profit to wellbeing.

I can see the conservative argument that welfare undermines the work ethic
and dampens moral fiber. Provide sufficient unemployment benefits and people
will opt to chill rather than labor. But it’s preposterous to extend this
argument to health care. Guaranteeing health coverage doesn’t incentivize
anybody to get meningitis.

This is a high-level argument, rising far above most arguments. It's written by a man who's lived in both America and Europe for much of his life, and is thus able to see differences that most of us can't see.

It does illustrate, I think, how America is really a different place from the rest of the world.