Reframe the debate: Health Care as a Civil Right

Rightardia comment: Middle Class Warrior agrees with Jonathan Alter. Health care is a civil right that should not be dependent upon employment.

A lot of Americans need to reject the corporate concept that they can be treated like indentured servants. Alter was interviewed on The Young Turks about his view of health care as a civil right. The interview was too long to embed, but Alter is on to a great idea.

By Jonathan Alter | NEWSWEEK

Published Aug 15, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Aug 31, 2009

The United States has two parties now—the Obama Party and the Fox Party. The Obama Party is larger, but it is unfocused and its troops are whiny. The Fox Party, which shows up en masse to harass politicians, is noisy and practiced in the art of simplistic obstruction.

As the health-care debate rages, it's the Party of Sort-of-Maybe-Yes versus the Party of Hell No! The Yessers are more lackadaisical because they've forgotten the stakes—they've forgotten that this is the most important civil-rights bill in a generation, though it is rarely framed that way.

The main reason that the bill isn't sold as civil rights is that most Americans don't believe there's a "right" to health care. They see their rights as inalienable, and thus free, which health care isn't.

Serious illness is an abstraction (thankfully) for younger Americans. It's something that happens to someone else, and if that someone else is older than 65, we know that Medicare will take care of it. Polls show that the 87 percent of Americans who have health insurance aren't much interested in giving any new rights and entitlements to "them"—the uninsured.

But how about if you or someone you know loses a job and the them becomes "us"? The recession, which is thought to be harming the cause of reform, could be aiding it if the story were told with the proper sense of drama and fright.

Since all versions of the pending bill ban discrimination by insurance companies against people with preexisting conditions, that provision isn't controversial. Which means it gets little attention. Which means that the deep moral wrong that passage of this bill would remedy is somehow missing from the debate.

See the rest of the article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/212162

Get 30 days of free traffic analysis simply by going to Web-Stat: http://www.web-stat.com/?id=2955

Subscribe to the Rightardia feed: feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/IGiu

Improve blog traffic with TrafficG http://trafficg.com/splash/splash01.php?uid=eelder1

Netcraft rank: 12834 http://toolbar.netcraft.com/stats/topsites?s=6C2826218226DBAE131D0E5D3916#12834