OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Morality, Rights and Health Care

John Jay, our first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was a big fan of de Vattel, and wanted to see the conservative principles of de Vattel's Law of Nations incorporated into American law, but wiser heads--including Jefferson's and Madison's--prevailed. John Armour Bingham, one of the principal authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, attempted to revive the concept in the Congress in the late Nineteenth Century, with even less success.

The concept of the "sovereign citizen" was then resurrected by the white supremacists of the Posse Comitatus and the Christian Identity Movement in the 1970's and 1980's, in an attempt to create a term to reestablish the inferiority of non-Whites, who in their minds, should not be considered "sovereign citizens."

The argument that these people make is that because President Obama's father was a citizen of Kenya, Barack Obama does not meet the requirements of a "natural born," i.e., "sovereign" citizen as the Founders and Framers intended, and thus should not be President of the United States.

As I have said before, my great-grandpappy used to fertilize the north forty with that kind of crap.

Since the Naturalization Act of 1790, it has been considered the prerogative of Congress to decide the qualifications for citizenship in this country, a prerogative that the Courts have been careful not to intrude upon in any decision on citizenship. The requirements established by Congress are that you must be born within the sovereign territory of the United States (which includes American warships and embassies), or that you must be born abroad of American parents. In 1961, Hawaii was a state, and part of sovereign United States territory. So, unless you can provide proof--not conjecture or forgeries, but proof--that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, you are arguing a lost cause.

This leads me into my next--and primary--discussion in this article: do we have a right to health care?

Conservatives, who--as I demonstrated above--have little if any difficulty in ascribing what they describe as "natural rights" to provide justification for the privileges that they believe they should enjoy, will say no. They will at the same time imply--and sometimes they will even state outright, as John McCain did during the 2008 Presidential Campaign--that health care is a privilege, reserved for those who can afford it, and that the rest of the American people can suffer with inadequate or non-existent health care.

So, what is wrong with this assertion?

First, it establishes and codifies a system of two distinct economic and social classes in this country. If you have adequate health care through coverage from your employer or because you are wealthy enough to afford it, then you are one of the haves: the people who to some greater or lesser extent are the elites who run this nation. If you do not have health care coverage, or if you have inadequate coverage that will cause you to bankrupt yourself if you or a member of your family become seriously ill, than you are a have not: a person with no real voice in how this country should be run. Besides the 47,000,000+ Americans who are currently uninsured (out of a total of 80 million Americans who, in any given year, are uninsured at some point in that year), there are at least that same number who are under insured. That places almost one-third of our nation in the economic and social status of second class citizens. If we are to truly have equal protection under the law, as promised under the Fourteenth Amendment, we cannot have two distinct classes of citizen.

Second, I do not believe that health care can legitimately be considered a privilege in our modern society. I believe that it is both a moral and civil right.

I will make a simple declarative statement here: in our modern, postindustrial society, comprehensive affordable health care is no longer a luxury for a long, productive, and happy life, it is a necessity. No matter how carefully one takes care of oneself, it is impossible to do so properly without the aid of a physician, who makes certain that your body is operating within normal parameters for your age, and who, with tests, detects the early warning signs of cancer and other illnesses. Additionally, we always live under the shadow of sudden illness--such as appendicitis--or accident, which might require surgery or time in a hospital to fully recover.

If health care is a necessity for any hope of pursuing a happy life in our modern era; then if we apply Jefferson's reasoning from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"" health care must logically be a moral right. Because a lack of health care, or such severe impediments to its acquisition (like the preexisting condition farce), makes both life and the pursuit of happiness so difficult that if they are not impossible, then they are so improbable as to prevent any reasonable expectation or hope of equal protection or opportunity for a large portion of the American people.

If health care is now an underpinning for what have been for 233 years recognized as the preeminent natural rights by American political philosophers, has it always been so?

In a broad sense, yes. However, American society and government has in the past failed to recognize this fact, in the same way that it failed at one time to recognize the immorality of slavery or not giving women the right to vote. As I have stated elsewhere: all power and authority is based on the belief of the populace in that power and authority. If tomorrow everyone believed me king, I would be king. At the time, the peculiar institution of slavery had this authority of belief, just as the disenfranchisement of women did in its time. It wasn't moral or correct; it was simply the way it was.

Today, I have very strong doubts that any true, liberty loving American would say that the freeing and full enfranchisement of our nation's African-Americans, or the granting of Women's Suffrage, is anything less than a recognition of a natural or "God given" right. Some of the more farsighted founders, primarily the two Thomases, Jefferson and Paine, foresaw some or all of these advances in humanity's perception and acceptance of our place in the world, and I believe they would have approved of these advances in our society.

The United States is lagging far behind the other Western Democracies in formally recognizing health care as a legal, i.e., civil right. This could be most easily changed by the United States Senate ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR), which was signed by President Carter in 1977.

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