Matt Holzmann explains in The Banality of Evil how the president and congressional leadership have lowered the mask and reveal that the various healthcare reform bills being circulated have nothing to do with fixing the healthcare system in the United States at all.
Somewhere far removed, bureaucrats make life and death decisions based on the numbers. With all of its faults, our current system values life much more highly. One of the chief theoreticians they seem to be listening to, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, the White House Chief of Staff’s brother, has openly discussed the “life value” of infants and the elderly, noting that a child is not really self aware until the age of two. This is a very, very dangerous discussion.
There are those who see governmental control over healthcare as a positive thing. Perhaps they are selfish and view a situation in which someone else is paying for their healthcare as worth supporting. It is also possible that some people view the need for universal coverage as a strong moral cause well worth championing.
One of the fundamental virtues Americans have always held is the value of life. Whether it is in the care for sick infants or the billions spent on AIDS research or the heroic measures in the operating room on an inner city gunshot victim, or on the battlefield where our troops are indoctrinated with “no man left behind”, or our fundamental obligation under Medicare for the care of our elders, we have almost always managed to do the right thing. We make herculean efforts to do so. There is a preferential option for the weak in our culture that we must never lose that is based upon our humanity and our faith.
Unfortunately, supporters of universal government healthcare are quite wrong. The ideal of universal coverage is quickly lost in the harsh reality of finite budgets.
The laws of our country governing commerce are made by a group of individuals who have never run a business, never met a payroll, have trouble with taxes and who consider major ethical violations to be unworthy of serious inquiry – and that is aside from the mysterious way in which they leave office as multi-millionares on a government salary. (Someone should write a book or something.) Thus far, they have managed to worsen the economy and lower their value in the eyes of the public to record depths.
Putting that motley crew in charge of the healthcare decisions of millions of Americans would be far worse than doing absolutely nothing. It is not as though critics have failed to offer concrete solutions which can fix our system. The fault, it seems, is that the solutions would give government less control and if a system cannot be taken advantage of to create jobs for cronies or for graft it hardly seems likely to get made into law.
The most damning argument is one of principle. The United Stated was founded on principle of liberty and in opposition to tyranny. We should keep those principles in mind in an important discussion of this magnitude.
