Yesterday yours truly was present at a rally sponsored by the James Madison Institute and Americans for Prosperity, protesting the Obamacare legislation:
“Tallahassee: Rallies Heat Up Outside City Hall”
Here I am:
Eric Giunta carries a sarcastic sign during the Hands Off My Healthcare rally Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009 outside City Hall in Tallahassee, Fla. The rally was sponsored by Americans for Prosperity and the James Madison Institute.
Let me make clear where I stand on all this proposed legislation:
1) It is absolutely odious that the government would force taxpayers to contribute any money to abortion services and euthanasia counseling.
2) While I firmly believe that a serious conservatism must advocate and advance a public sense of social responsibility for those who cannot help themselves, it is unambiguously unconstitutional for the federal government to advance a “public option” healthcare system. Until the United States Constitution is duly amended, healthcare reform is solely an issue for the states, along with counties and municipalities.
3) In keeping with the principle of subsidiarity, health care reform should leave as much to the free market as is socially responsible. Reasonable free-market solutions should be tried and tested before relying on government machinery to solve these problems. And when government is employed in the administration of health care, municipal and county intervention should be exhausted before recourse is had to a centralized state bureaucracy. This includes taxation. Let citizens in their own localities determine what their medical needs are, and raise their own taxes if and when they are ready to shoulder the burden of government-run health care
4) Proponents of healthcare reform do themselves no favor by exaggerating the problems. There is no “healthcare crisis” in America. The number of chronically uninsured is very low, and it simply is not the case that the uninsured necessarily go without adequate healthcare. (Even if the oft-cited “45 million uninsured” figure were accurate [and its not], that still leaves 80 percent of Americans with health insurance–hardly a crisis!)
5) We cannot have utopian expectations. The poor we will have always, along with those who get sick and die because “the system” fails them. This does not justify such failures, but it should put our expectations into perspective, and we ground us in the realism that failures do not a crisis make.
In short: libertarians and leftists both have this issue wrong. At least the former have the Constitution going for them vis-a-vis the federal government. What we need are common-sense solutions, several of which are making their way through Congress via the Republicans (if only the Democrats would let them get passed committee!). I for one am very sympathetic to the idea of co-ops, though I don’t believe it is constitutional for the federal government to subsidize them.
