Dwight, so nice of you to drop by. Do you want to have another big fight? They are sort of fun in a perverse way.
Maybe you are not aware of all of the people in the United States who have too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but who have been rejected for insurance because of preexisting conditions or because they present too much risk to insurers. Perhaps you don't realize that all of the people without insurance who are treated at public hospitals, emergency rooms and trauma centers make your insurance rates, and your taxes, go up. One of the things that Bill and Hillary's plan would have accomplished is to make insurance more available for people who do not now qualify. We are all paying for the uninsured already, but there is a lot of human tragedy and unfairness involved. The HMO's have a profit motive, and while some profit motive can be good in that it makes service efficient, it is not so positive when people who have paid for coverage are cheated out of it.
I do believe that everyone should try to stay as healthy as possible. Unfortunately, not everyone is perfect, and for some people it is beyond them because of substance abuse or other disadvantages. In my perfect world treatment for alcohol and drug addiction, and effective stop-smoking programs, would be readily available, and public health education would be at the top of my to-do list.
You are basically using the same argument with health care in modern societies, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, that is often used with Christianity and the Bible. In my opinion, in the same way that the rules of a tribal society in the Middle East two thousand years ago are not all relevant today, I think the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should be living documents. Our forefathers could not have imagined creating a society where children were blowing each other away at school with automatic weapons, for example. Slavery was legal then, and it is not now. In order for societies to evolve and improve, the spirit of the country, not just the dusty old documents of hundreds of years ago, should be considered. The people who revolted against the English and created a new country were the avant garde thinkers and intellectuals and inventors of their time, and to me it is morally wrong to freeze political thought and law, and with it the health of our nation. I think they would be stunned and saddened to see what America has become.
By the same token, I am comparing the United States to western industrialized nations when I talk about health care. We are the only one which does not consider health care for all a basic right. Why am I not surprised? We are primitive in so many ways. I think we have a lot to be embarrassed about, really. |
