Let’s take a journey back in time.The date is April 10, 1912, and you and your family are preparing to board the Titanic.As your family boards, you notice something alarming: there aren’t nearly enough lifeboats. You immediately start having second thoughts about your family’s safety crossing the iceberg-laden northern Atlantic.Billy Zane scorns your trepidation, saying, “God himself couldn’t sink this ship.” Al Gore assures you icebergs don’t exist and urges you to consider Man-Bear-Pig insuranceinstead.But you’re still leery, so you make a simple arrangement with a deckhand reserving a small raft for your family — just to be safe. Sure enough, the ship scrapes an iceberg and starts sinking. Luckily your family is safe.Or so you think.But in the midst of the turmoil, anarchy erupts. A belligerent Billy Zane storms your family’s raft, bursting the raft and dumping your family into the frigid ocean. Across the ship, rafts are being overrun and imploded. Nobody is safe.Sure, this scenario is a tad extreme. But it helps illustrate some commonly held misconceptions about our sinking health care system.Put into proper perspective, health insurance, like lifeboat insurance, is designed to protect clients from incredibly rare, unforeseeable future risk — not accommodate every ill-stricken person.Politicians love railing against insurers for “discriminating.” But the fact that insurance companies discriminate shouldn’t enrage anyone. The whole point of the insuranceindustry is precisely to discriminate based on preexisting conditions.From both a social and financial standpoint, this isn’t villainous; it’s heroic. Discrimination reduces premiums and controls costs by encouraging people to apply for coveragebefore they get sick, not after. This system rewards the financially wise while punishing procrastinators.Like it or not, healthy discrimination plays a much-needed role in shaping our daily decisions. Girls agree there’s nothing wrong with shooting a guy down based on his “preexisting condition” of “registered sex offender.” Similarly, guys have every right to avoid girls whose preexisting conditions are “slutty” or “high maintenance.”Metaphorically speaking, forcing lifeboat captains to take on excessive risk only endangers the people already on board. Sadly, many public officials would rather elicit populist support by preying on easy targets — like health insurers — than actually helpright the ship. High insurance premiums and restricted coverage are onlysymptoms of our medical sector’s underlying problems.If we’re really concerned with protecting all Americans, our goal shouldn’t simply be extending medical coverage to all. The goal should be to reduce medical costs and enable competition by removing barriers to entry and eliminating unnecessary licensing restrictions. When the supply of medicallytrained personel increases and ratesbecome more affordable, wealth is created, not redistributed.Using our Titanic metaphor, we need more rafts and less overcrowding.Unfortunately, these appeals to long-term sustainability and fiscal restraint are often drowned by the incessant complaints of shortsighted politicians and moral posturers. Contrary to popular rhetoric, Americans aren’t morally obligated to embrace the president’s proposed health care overhaul.The best solutions to our medical problems don’t involve further government control, but voluntary arrangements and free choice.Besides, denying coverage doesn’t mean denying aid entirely. There are plenty of voluntary charities and clinics that would benefit from legitimate, market-based reforms. These alternatives need to be encouraged, not dismissed. I’d have a much easier timetaking universal health care advocates seriously if they at least made some concerted effort to live out the values they so desperately want to impose on others.That said, I welcome proponents of a single-payer system to put their beliefs into action. They can start by establishing voluntary collectivized health care schemes that don’t deny anyone coverage. This would give us a better chance to observe the magical cost-cuttingmerits of collectivized medicine in practice rather than in theory.The world would be far better if these self-proclaimed moralists stopped distorting ethics and pretending to care about the less fortunate and actually started acting on their convictions.But I’m not holding my breath.Scott Burns is a 20-year-old economics junior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter@TDR_sburns.– – – -Contact Scott Burns at [email protected]