Health care reform
Months of debate have produced "health care" bills that need life support. They are so riddled with conditions that they are doomed to destruct. The original concept has been shot full of holes, bearing little resemblance to what I think Americans really want: a chance for them and their families to be healthy and to get reasonable treatment when not, without having to take out a second mortgage.
Why have dozens of civilized countries been able to provide health care for all, for decades, at a sensible cost, but America cannot? I believe it is because they, unlike America, do not view health care as a cash cow for private interests, but "the right thing to do", and a social investment in its own citizens.
Why is it so much easier for Congressmen to fund killing, than caring? For the last 8 years, they have ignored domestic needs while throwing over a trillion dollars to support invasive war and brutal destruction - and barely debating it. Yes, they have prioritized death, injury and displacement of over a million civilians, and have subjected our military and their families to an untenable burden.
Have they all lost their minds? Have we, to accept this from our elected officials, who are our employees?
Jo Sippie-Gora, Kinnelon.
Wrong on health rights
In a letter to the editor ("Health care is a right," July 30) a writer stated that health care was a human rights issue. Some argue that health care is a "precondition of life itself." This argument is flawed. There are other more important preconditions for life, such as food, shelter, and clothing.
If health care is a right, how did our forefathers miss that? It's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," not life, an appointment with a doctor, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The question of health care is not rights, but how best to provide health care at the lowest possible cost. The outcome would make health care more affordable.
The number of "uninsured" Americans that is thrown around, 45 million, is easily corrected when you look at the 2007 census. The truer figure is 22 million once you remove the 14 million undocumented workers, the 15 percent who choose not to have insurance for their own reasons and those 5 percent that are between jobs.
The true way to provide affordable health care to more of those 22 million citizens is to foster competition between insurers. Remove restrictions on citizens crossing state lines to seek affordable health care. Limit malpractice lawsuits. Keep your freedom to choose, don't turn health care over to a swollen, mismanaged federal government.
W. Paul Kelley, Berkeley Heights
My Commentary:
W. Paul Kelley is absolutely correct. Health care is not and can not be a right. Neither can any man-made product or service.
The fundamental principle that America was founded upon is unalienable individual rights possessed equally by all people, at all times, and protected equally and at all times by government. Rights are guarantees to freedom of action within a social context...such as the rights to speech, religious practice, and the earning of property through productive work and voluntary, mutually beneficial trade. A right is not an automatic claim on the products, services, earnings, skills, or property produced by others.
Consider the claim that a manmade product such as healthcare is a right, and what it actually means in practice. If someone requires medical care, then the doctors, nurses, pharmaceutical and device makers, etc., must be legally obligated (i.e., compelled) to provide their services to that person. Likewise, that person’s neighbor, or the guy 3000 miles away, must be legally obligated to pay for his treatment. In other words, the providers whose skills make medical care possible, as well as those whose taxes pay for it, are serfs.
Rights, properly understood, are political and place no obligation or duty on the individual save one…to respect the same rights of all. The idea of economic rights…the right to material values such as health care…forces an involuntary servitude on others to provide it. Economic rights...which are actually entitlements, not rights...obliterate our actual rights to life, liberty, and property. That is why the alleged “right” to health care requires a government takeover of the medical field…to give the state the power to loot and enslave the people.
This is not, as Jo Sippie-Gora claims, "the right thing to do", no matter how many other peoples and nations say so. The sacrifice of the productive and self-supporting to the parasites and the power-lusters has been the scourge of mankind that the United States of America was created to banish; by guaranteeing to each human being the rights to his own life, his own liberty, his own earned property, and the pursuit of his own goals and happiness.
All of us fighting against "universal health care" must recognize that health care is not a right…if all manifestations of socialized medicine are to be stopped and the proper free market reforms can be implemented.
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