Opinion | How Being Sick Changed My Health Care Views – The New York Times

But then comes the complicating factor, the part of my experience that turned me more right-wing. Because in the second phase of my illness, once I knew roughly what was wrong with me and the problem was how to treat it, I very quickly entered a world where the official medical consensus had little to offer me. It was only outside that consensus, among Lyme disease doctors whose approach to treatment lacked any C.D.C. or F.D.A. imprimatur, that I found real help and real hope.

And this experience made me more libertarian in various ways, more skeptical not just of our own medical bureaucracy, but of any centralized approach to health care policy and medical treatment.

This was true even though the help I found was often expensive and it generally wasn’t covered by insurance; like many patients with chronic Lyme, I had to pay in cash. But if I couldn’t trust the C.D.C. to recognize the effectiveness of these treatments, why would I trust a more socialized system to cover them? After all, in socialized systems cost control often depends on some centralized authority — like Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence or the controversial, stillborn Independent Payment Advisory Board envisioned by Obamacare — setting rules or guidelines for the system as a whole. And if you’re seeking a treatment that official expertise does not endorse, I wouldn’t expect such an authority to be particularly flexible and open-minded about paying for it.

Quite the reverse, in fact, given the trade-off that often shows up in health policy, where more free-market systems yield more inequalities but also more experiments, while more socialist systems tend to achieve their egalitarian advantages at some cost to innovation. Thus many European countries have cheaper prescription drugs than we do, but at a meaningful cost to drug development. Americans spend obscene, unnecessary-seeming amounts of money on our system; America also produces an outsize share of medical innovations.

And if being mysteriously sick made me more appreciative of the value of an equalizing floor of health-insurance coverage, it also made me aware of the incredible value of those breakthroughs and discoveries, the importance of having incentives that lead researchers down unexpected paths, even the value of the unusual personality types that become doctors in the first place. (Are American doctors overpaid relative to their developed-world peers? Maybe. Am I glad that American medicine is remunerative enough to attract weird Type A egomaniacs who like to buck consensus? Definitely.)

Whatever everyday health insurance coverage is worth to the sick person, a cure for a heretofore-incurable disease is worth more. The cancer patient has more to gain from a single drug that sends their disease into remission than a single-payer plan that covers a hundred drugs that don’t. Or to take an example from the realm of chronic illness, just last week researchers reported strong evidence that multiple sclerosis, a disease once commonly dismissed as a species of “hysteria,” is caused by the Epstein-Barr virus. If that discovery someday yields an actual cure for MS, it will be worth more to people suffering from the disease than any insurance coverage a government might currently offer them.

So if the weakness of the libertarian perspective on health insurance is its tendency minimize the strange distinctiveness of illness, to treat patients too much like consumers and medical coverage too much like any other benefit, the weakness of the liberal focus on equalizing cost and coverage is the implicit sense that medical care is a fixed pie in need of careful divvying, rather than a zone where vast benefits await outside the realm of what’s already available.