Some Perspective On Universal Health Care and the Founding Fathers

How many times have you heard a Democratic politician or pundit say a href="http://www.mydd.com/story/2009/3/9/18277/26800"something like this/a?br /br /blockquotepAmong the OECD's 30 members -- which include Australia, Austria, Belgium,Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom -- there are only three lacking universal health coverage. The other two happen to be Mexico and Turkey, which have the excuse of being poorer than the rest (and until the onset of the world economic crisis, Mexico was on the way to providing healthcare to all of its citizens). The third, of course, is us."/pp(Here is a href="http://www.olis.oecd.org/olis/2009doc.nsf/LinkTo/NT00000B6A/$FILE/JT03259332.PDF"the actual report/a from the OECD web site)br /br /"The story gets worse as the details emerge. Although the public share of health expenditure in the United States is much lower than any other OECD country except Mexico, the public expenditure on healthcare is much higher per capita than in most OECD countries. So we pay a lot more in taxes devoted to medical care -- not including insurance premiums, co-payments, fees, and other health costs -- than taxpayers in those 27 countries that have universal coverage. Our public expenditure provides coverage only for the elderly and some of the poor (through Medicaid and the SCHIP program for children) while other countries provide universal coverage while spending less."br //p/blockquotebr /br /Let's think about this for a minute. The U.S. doesn't have universal health insurance coverage and many pundits and Democratic politicians think this is bad. Isn't having health insurance a choice? If it's a choice what does it say about all those nations that have universal coverage. It means that there is no choice.br /br /This country was founded on liberty. It was founded on the principle that the government would leave the citizenry alone and only performing the basic functions of protecting the citizens. Now, we bemoan the fact that the U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn't have universal coverage. Of course, universal coverage means forced coverage.br /br /What would the founding fathers think of someone proclaiming that the lack of "universal health care" in the U.S. is a bad thing? Health insurance wasn't even a creation when the Revolutionary War was fought. Now, some politician thinks that it should not only be a right but a demand of the citizens. In fact, anyone that views our nation as the only industrialized without universal coverage as a bad thing knows very little about the principles that this nation was founded on.br /br /This nation was founded on the principle of liberty. Health insurance should be as available and cheap as possible. It should not be mandated. It should NOT be paid for by the taxes of someone else. That infringes on the liberty of those being taxed. Anyone that looks at our place in the world, as the only industrialized nation without universal health care, and thinks that's a bad thing simply has no idea what this country was founded on.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3098264341625381422-8589921342364534774?l=theeprovocateur.blogspot.com'//div