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.
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