Posted by
DecoNservAtiVE on Friday, July 03, 2009 10:02:47 PM
The White House has set an expiration date for the Universal Healthcare Debate. Barack Obama has declared that Congress must pass healthcare reform by the end of July. Reform is necessary but how is the question. Senator Ted Kennedy has a plan for Universal Coverage run by the government and just about everyone else on both sides of the aisle has a plan either similar or in response to it. The most asked question of all of these plans is “How much does it cost?” The arguments are intense and generally centered around two themes. First is the idea that healthcare is a right defined in the Constitution as “General Welfare”. The second is sustainability.
Founders Values had representatives at a listening session on healthcare reform hosted by Congressman Mike Castle recently. There were many groups represented and the overwhelming majority of them were groups like ACORN. In fact, a representative from one group stood up and proclaimed that healthcare is a universal right and a moral responsibility of our government which of course became the theme of the meeting. In fact our founding fathers felt decidedly different as described by Leonard Peikoff, Ph.D. in 1993 when he stated “Today, however, we are seeing the rise of principled immorality in this country. We are seeing a total abandonment by the intellectuals and the politicians of the moral principles on which the U.S. was founded. We are seeing the complete destruction of the concept of rights. The original American idea has been virtually wiped out, ignored as if it had never existed. The rule now is for politicians to ignore and violate men's actual rights, while arguing about a whole list of rights never dreamed of in this country's founding documents -- rights which require no earning, no effort, no action at all on the part of the recipient.”.
Our founding fathers believed that while we had certain unalienable rights, we also had responsibilities. They believed that Americans should provide things like housing, entertainment and medical care for themselves. The founding fathers specifically enumerated the federal governments powers and through the founders writings we can see that even the general welfare clause was clarified as Jefferson did in 1791 “They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose.”.
The argument of sustainability runs parallel to the question of Constitutional intent. If healthcare was a right specifically enumerated by the Constitution why then would James Madison have written "If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury;
they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, everything, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."? We also know that the founding fathers were very frugal. They put in place protections that were intended to limit the spending and taxation by the federal government to specific enumerated purposes even going so far as to suggest that the government ought not undertake any spending that they could not repay within 19 years. The Universal Healthcare Plan from Ted Kennedy, endorsed by the White House, would cost over 1 Trillion dollars over the next 10 year and would leave 30 million Americans uninsured.
So the real issue is of balance: healthcare reform without government control. While I cannot list all of the options here, CPRights.org compares the full text and basic details of 16 different plans including universal healthcare options. I urge all of you to read and decide for yourself what makes sense to you.