Without a program that guarantees high quality healthcare for children, regardless of their circumstances, or those of their responsible adult guardian; it is impossible to ensure our nation's future through our children. Thus, a system of guaranteed national health insurance for children is necessary for our nation's future. It is self-destructive madness for our nation to do anything else.
The next question is: at what age does this healthcare protection for children end? Sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one?
My answer is, it does not end.
It seems to a me a waste of time and effort to end a system of universal national health insurance for an individual at the moment when a child is about to become a productive, contributing member of American society. In what is, all things considered, the healthiest time in a human life, Americans in their twenties and thirties are the least likely to require expensive medical services, while contributing to a national health insurance fund. In other words, they will help spread the risk for both the older and younger members of our society, and help keep down costs for all of us.
This will also permit us to begin an aggressive policy of proactive health programs among young adults that will permit us to keep our medical costs down in the future. Little things like routine annual dental and medical exams in exchange for not increasing your personal contribution to the national insurance fund.
This system would be folded into an improved Medicare/Medicaid system, so that no American ever has to choose between going to the doctor and getting a prescription, and they or their families having to go hungry again.
Many Libertarians and conservatives consider such a system to be an infringement upon their personal freedom. But only if you believe that your freedom is an anarchistic right to do as you will, regardless of the consequences to others. As William Barth pointed out in his article "Health Care Reform and the Libertarian Impulse" (OpEdNews.com, 25 August, 2009), "Medical treatment, like food and shelter, is a necessity of life, which an individual cannot simply choose to do without. Libertarians on the left for example, maintain that society must be structured to guarantee basic resources so that an individual may do what he or she wants with life, and thereby attain the personal freedom that libertarians require." Mr. Barth continues "...many left libertarians are less concerned with the structure than with the actual provision of medical care itself. Thus, if an individual is denied privately-owned health insurance because of a prior illness, or a job change, this threatens his or her personal freedom as much as a does [sic] a public bureaucracy that rations the amount of medical care."
"These uninsured patients face severe restrictions on their personal freedom, and indeed on their very chances of survival, because of their inability to purchase expensive medical treatment," Mr. Barth concludes.
It is impossible to pursue one's life, liberty, or happiness if you are continually in fear of losing everything to one hospital stay.
There are some conservatives who will argue that the Federal Government does not have the explicit authority, under our Constitution, to ensure the provision of comprehensive, affordable healthcare for all Americans.
If we rely solely on explicit authority under our Constitution, there would have been no Louisiana Purchase, no Supreme Court power to declare a law or government act unconstitutional, no Civil War to maintain the Union, no application of our Constitutional rights to the individual states, and no sending Federal troops into Little Rock to see that the schools were desegregated. The last would have made the United States would have been an apartheid nation every bit as much as South Africa was before Mandela.
We could easily make the right to healthcare a Constitutional right by forcing two-thirds of the Senate to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. This treaty, which would make the last ten articles of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights legally binding, was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and has been awaiting ratification for the last thirty years. Only three members of the United Nations have not signed and ratified this treaty: Cambodia, Liberia, and the United States of America. This is not good company with which to be associated.
If this treaty were ratified, it would, under Article VI of the Constitution, join the Constitution as the Supreme law of the land, and healthcare would become a right under American law.
Understand, our Medicare system is not without faults. One of the biggest is that the formulae for reimbursing physicians, hospitals, and other providers of healthcareare out of date, especially for rural providers. I think that the reimbursement formulae need to be adjusted to meet current medical and financial realities, and that the Department of Health and Human Services should be required by law to review and empowered to adjust the formulae not less than once every five years. I also think that Congress should be required to review this law every ten years.
Many of the other faults with Medicare can be laid at the door of conservatives, who have been trying to kill the program since its inception.
Starving them for funds is one way the conservatives have been trying to kill both Medicare and Social Security. I would extend FICA and Social Security taxes to cover all wages, and not have a "cap" like the one that is currently at approximately $110,000.00. I would also make these taxes progressive, rather than a flat tax.
