As healthcare “reform” draws closer to a vote, those who want universal health care are bringing out the small guns — small children, that is, and stories about those of them who can’t get health insurance, as Yahoo! News reports. A four-month-old baby was denied coverage for being too heavy. A 2-year-old girl was denied for not being heavy enough. We are supposed to feel outrage on behalf of these children — our system must be wrong if innocent babies can’t get insurance, right? And we’ve got to force the insurance companies to do the right thing and cover them (and everybody else), right?

WRONG!

First of all, it’s not at all clear that being denied health insurance is a tragedy for a kid. What kind of health services do most children consume? Immunizations, trips to the pediatrician for a cold, broken bones — none of which is pleasant, but none of which is a family-devastating expense if properly planned for. (Yes, I know you can’t plan when a broken bone happens, but you can keep an emergency fund around, knowing that it can be tapped for that kind of thing.) For the most part, kids don’t get cancer, heart disease, or other diseases that would bankrupt all but millionaires without insurance. Nobody should be buying insurance for routine stuff like scraped knees and runny noses, any more than we should be buying insurance for oil changes and gas tank fillups, as I’ve described previously.

Second, even if it were a tragedy, insurers still have the right to say no. You can write letters to the CEO and tell him you think it’s a disgrace, you can give a television interview, you can urge everyone in your town to boycott the insurer — but you have no right to force that insurer to cover that kid by getting a law passed. If an insurer looks at all the facts and decides that the financial risk of insuring that child is greater than the benefits of collecting his premiums, it has the right to take action according to that decision — to decline to offer coverage. Let’s say you’re a carpenter and your neighbor wants you to fix the hole in his roof for $500. Not only would you need to charge $1,000 to make it worth your while, but you’d really prefer to spend your time teaching your son to play baseball. Does your neighbor have a right to force you to fix the hole for $500, just because you can? Absolutely not — and neither do we have the right to force insurers to go against their judgment and make them cover people, even children, whom they have deemed poor risks.

And third, let’s not forget what Economics in One Lesson teaches: It’s easy to point to a crying baby and say, “We need universal health care!” But we cannot forget that forcing the insurer to cover a million babies at a loss might mean it cuts its workforce by 10%, throwing people out of work; forcing a young couple with no health problems to buy high-priced comprehensive coverage (so that their premiums can subsidize the old and the sick) might mean they can’t afford their first home; forcing a small business to pay even more taxes than it does already might mean it shuts its doors, and we are all poorer by the goods it will no longer produce. It’s easy to point to sob stories like the underweight toddler and the overweight baby, but implementing universal health care will simply create more sad cases that are invisible to those in power — and it will violate rights on a massive scale.

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