There are many reasons to be suspicious of President-elect Barack Obama's plan to introduce Universal Health Care: fears about corruption, lowest-common-denominator treatment, limitation of options, etc. But perhaps the most deep-seated is the fear that it may the first step toward legislating the behavior of citizens. After all, if I am paying for your health care, don't I have a say in how you live? This is not merely a "what if?" scenario, but a situation that many European and Asian democracies are dealing with today.
Government is always a balance between protecting freedoms and limiting freedoms in order to allow human being to live together peacefully and productively. As the debate over Universal Health Care begins in the next few weeks, we must remember the potential for evil in a system which is intended to do good.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Would Universal Health Care threaten personal freedom?
Posted by Nomad at 6:47 AM
Labels: democracy, government, insurance, unintended consequences, universal health care
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
What if the government could have some sort of catastrophic insurance for people, so that if something major happened, then people wouldn't be set back for life trying to pay back the bills? Not sure I would support this as policy, but I think it would be interesting to debate.
It's funny... all the liberal types see this sort of thing happening with the Patriot Act, but they don't see it with health care...
According to Michael Moore, Cuba is a paradise... so you can't really say anything bad about the government if you want to remain alive and out of prison, so what, it has free health care!
Post a Comment