Health Care Debate Misses The Point, As Usual

People locking horns over whether the feds should launch an "overhaul of America's health care system" appear to be debating the finer points of whether this grandiose plan makes fiscal sense or promises to improve the defects in the present system. Consistent with the amoral and technocratic mindset that our schools and universities pride themselves on producing, almost no one is pausing to consider the larger concerns here.

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading my rantings that my first objection is based on the Constitution, which delegates no authority to the federal government to embark on a quest to commandeer the interactions between doctors, nurses, hospitals, and patients. Any such effort belongs to the States by default, whose citizens could mercifully move elsewhere if an experiment such as this proved disastrous. I recognize that the rule of law is a quaint concept that now yields to the perceived exigencies of the moment, but allow me to rhapsodize about the America that my elders taught me to admire.

But let us assume (with some ease) that the Constitution poses no obstacle here. In my own case, if a given State sought to regulate health care, I would have to admit that my constitutional objections would vanish. Even then, a proposal to dictate how people may choose to provide legal goods and services to each other would strike anyone honestly calling himself "free" as repugnant and evil, meaning that in a "healthy" America the proposal would automatically fail politically even if not legally. The fact that it's not failing, but as a matter of fact is gaining ground, reveals a cultural collapse that no legal system could possibly resuscitate. Sure, various other countries provide "free" health care all the time, but America once prided itself on being different from the rest of the world in regard to a man's right to govern his own existence within very broad boundaries. We are no longer different from the rest of the world, meaning that we are different from how we used to be. That's the saddest part of all.