“Yes, the Senate GOP tax plan would cause ‘thousands’ to die.”
So read the headline of a short essay by Lawrence Summers published in the Washington Post on Sunday night. Summers, an eminent economist and former Treasury secretary, argues that the thousands of deaths will be a consequence of the Senate tax bill’s provision eliminating the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that individuals purchase health insurance or face a penalty.
This argument is overblown. It implies that the goal of public policy should be to reduce the number of preventable deaths to something as close to zero as possible. But of course this isn’t the case. More than 30,000 people die every year in car accidents. Each of these deaths is a tragedy, and in the truest sense, every life has inestimable value. But our fallen world has finite resources, and as a society we have decided that some deaths are an acceptable trade-off for the benefits of allowing vehicles to travel faster than 20 miles per hour. A similar argument could be made for policies surrounding homicides, foreign conflicts and a host of other issues.
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