Nadya Suleman’s Octuplets & the Perils of Public Charity

The AP reports that you and I will be paying the cost of rearing Nadya Suleman's newborn octuplets --  as well as her other six children -- through various state and federal welfare programs:

Even before the 33-year-old single, unemployed mother gave birth to octuplets last month, she had been caring for her six other children with the help of $490 a month in food stamps, plus Social Security disability payments for three of the youngsters. The public aid will almost certainly be increased with the new additions to her family.

Also, the hospital where the octuplets are expected to spend seven to 12 weeks has requested reimbursement from Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program, for care of the premature babies, according to the Los Angeles Times...

In California, a low-income family can receive Social Security payments of up to $793 a month for each disabled child. Three children would amount to $2,379.

The Suleman octuplets' medical costs have not been disclosed, but in 2006, the average cost for a premature baby's hospital stay in California was $164,273, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Eight times that is more than $1.3 million, and the average cost for just one cesarean birth in 2006 was $22,762 in California.

A reasonable person might ask, "So what?  Poor kids need help.  Would you rather let them die?"  That certainly does not seem to be the answer.  Yet there are perils inherent in having government come to the rescue. 

One challenge confronting both public and private charity is known as the Samaritan's dilemma: any effort to help the needy inevitably discourages self-help.  People at the margins don't work as hard, or even take deliberate advantage of others' altruism, which increases the number of people "in need."  That appears to have happened in Suleman's case:

Word of the public assistance has stoked the furor over Suleman's decision to have so many children by having embryos implanted in her womb...

Suleman received disability payments for an on-the-job back injury during a riot at a state mental hospital, collecting more than $165,000 over nearly a decade before the benefits were discontinued last year.

Some of the disability money was spent on in vitro fertilizations, which was used for all 14 of her children, Suleman said. She said she also worked double shifts at the mental hospital and saved up for the treatments. She estimated that all her treatments cost $100,000.

The First Peril of Public Charity is that government does a relatively poor job of discouraging such opportunistic behavior.  Food stamps, Social Security disability payments, and Medicaid benefits are entitlement programs.  So long as Suleman meets the statutory eligibility criteria, she is legally entitled to benefits no matter how much she may be milking the system.  It is extremely difficult to tailor government eligibility rules (whether statutory or regulatory) to prevent all the possible forms of abuse.   And even if some government bureaucrat tries to cut off welfare recipients who are abusing the system, those recipients can sue the government and there are legions of lawyers who will help.  Private charity is much better at discouraging opportunistic behavior by tailoring assistance to the truly needy.  Did Suleman and her children truly need all the public assistance they had been receiving?  Would she have been able to afford in-vitro fertilization had she not been on public assistance?  If the availability of additional charity were less certain, would she have tried to get pregnant again?  Maybe, but probably not.

The Second Peril of Public Charity is that taxpayers and politicians respond to the First Peril of Public Charity by insisting that government take away people's rights.  Much of the crusade against smokers' and restaurateurs' rights is justified by the need to limit government spending on medical care for smoking-related illness.  Ditto the crusade to limit your right to eat fatty foods. 

Suleman's case has led taxpayers to recommend some startling policy responses:

On the Internet, bloggers rained insults on Suleman, calling her an "idiot," criticizing her decision to have more children when she couldn't afford the ones she had, and suggesting she be sterilized.

"It's my opinion that a woman's right to reproduce should be limited to a number which the parents can pay for," Charles Murray [not the American Enterprise Institute scholar] wrote in a letter to the Los Angeles Daily News. "Why should my wife and I, as taxpayers, pay child support for 14 Suleman kids?"...

"From the outside you can tell that this woman was playing the system," host Bryan Suits said on the "Kennedy and Suits" show on KFI-AM. "You're damn right the state should step in and seize the kids and adopt them out."

Emphasis added.

Those responses are a predictable consequence of government charity.  They reflect the same selfish rationale that the Church of Universal Coverage uses to argue for eliminating your right to choose health insurance. 

If somebody is abusing generosity, the appropriate response is not to take away their rights but to take away the generosity. (Some curtailment of parental rights can be justified if the children are in danger. But we don’t yet know if Suleman is going to get a reality-TV deal out of this.) Private charity can do that. Government is ill-equipped to do so, and so our rights come under attack.

The irony is that the Left's adamant support for government charity is eroding smokers' rights, property rights, dietary rights, medical rights, and now even the Left's cherished reproductive rights -- making the Left less and less liberal by the day.