It is unfortunate that some folks still confuse the right of all citizens to basic health care, with buying an HDTV, or an iPhone, or a trip to the Cayman Islands.
The latter are opportunities which are supplied by private business, for whomever has the disposable income to demand them. One may feel a need for that HGTV, but one can always watch the old monster until the tax refund comes in.
An illness or injury cannot wait, is often threatening to life, limb, and or continued employment. Health is a genuine need, and should not, therefore, be subject to to the conventional laws of supply and demand. Health care, is a right common to all citizens and its provision must be understood in terms of a public good, like roads, schools, fire, and police protection.
Our nation’s founders obviously supported the private ownership and transfer of goods and services, fully anticipating that there would be haves and have-nots among the citizenry.
But they also provided for the public financing and egalitarian distribution of certain basic goods and services to all. To this day, our government collects taxes with the understanding that, to fulfill that very social contract, we must all share in the responsibility.
It would be simply un-American, to deny a crime victim justice, because she was broke. It would be equally unconscionable to deny a child a basic education, because he lived in a poor neighborhood. Is a cheap motel on East Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado, allowed to burn to the ground, its transient residents to die in the blaze? Most sane people think not. Why, then, do some people still insist that it is proper for 30,000 citizens to die each year, because they cannot buy basic health care?
I have heard the capitalist, Aristotelian apology for such a travesty; cheap, disingenuous, spin, coming mostly from “Bible Belt” legislators, bought and paid for by the insurance/pharma industries.
As for the general public, none but the most selfish, heartless, and myopic, would espouse this view. It is proper, in a capitalist society, to wait for that iPhone, (or finance its purchace), but we cannot and should not wait to exercise our right to basic, publically financed health care for all of our citizens.
J. Brandeis Sperandeo lives in Denver. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
