What is wrong with the radical opposition to reasonable health-care reform? Soon after the death of Senator Kennedy, Mike Huckabee, former governor and presidential candidate and minister, declared that, had the currently proposed health-care reform been in place, Senator Kennedy would have been forced to go home to die after his diagnosis of a brain tumor. Obviously, Governor Huckabee had not taken the time to read Sec. 1233 of the proposed “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act,” which deals with advance planning and life sustaining options. Nowhere is it written that patients, at any age, must forgo medical care.
I don’t know if spreading these lies and inaccuracies is due to fear of change, ignorance, laziness, or pure ill will. The mantra is always the same. It doesn’t seem to matter that bearing false witness is so unproductive, damaging to America, and—especially coming from a religious man—un-Christian.
What is wrong with us, that we tolerate these vile, uncivil outbursts by uninformed and radicalized mobs without demanding decent decorum so that factual information can be exchanged? Health care should be a universal right, and as such is an American value. The preamble to our Constitution prescribes that in order to form a more perfect union, we need to promote the general welfare.
Most of those who have tried to explain that a public alternative unifies the long list of needed reforms—coverage for the uninsured, cost control, no preconditions, no denial of keeping care when you change jobs, equal treatment for women, and on and on—have been shouted down.
I hope that men and women of good will check the facts of what they hear. I hope all of us will take the time to be informed and start seriously to contemplate what reform will mean to us, our families, businesses, and the economy, and then consider how the status quo will weaken our health-care system and the future of our country.
This article appears in Sep 10-17, 2009.