Universal Healthcare and Why It’s Impossible NOT to Support It!

I’m going to try getting back into…the groove. Ha. As well as trying to improve my earlier writing style. Reading back, my writing seems more like rants with little too back them up, and nothing interesting on new issues. It’s been a while since I’ve written like this, so I’ll probably sound like an idiot, but here goes. Hopefully I haven’t written something similar before. I still haven’t gone through everything.

An argument for universal, socialized healthcare.

America was founded on a central idea: the rights of the people would be protected by the government. Our Bill of Rights guarantees the protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. One can argue endlessly about liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but every human being’s right to life is undeniable.

In America today, millions of impoverished people are being denied their right to live because they cannot pay for health insurance, or their insurance companies deny them care. There is no reason to keep universal healthcare from reaching the people who need it. Yes, it may result in higher taxes. Yes, it may be harder to sustain. Are we a nation who cannot even make such necessary and easy sacrifices to save lives? There is no reason that wealth should ever affect one’s right to live. There are those who would argue that it is the person’s own fault for not seizing opportunities to become wealthy. Yet many of these people have not had the opportunity to become wealthy–children born into poor families, for example, should never have to die for their parent’s mistakes. And the few who can afford healthcare on their own, around 1% of our population, are gaining more and more — undeserved — wealth through inheritance, extortion, outsourcing, and other dishonest means, yet those born into poverty through no fault of their own suffer and die?

I’ll give an example of an infant death due to our insurance system, one that frankly sickens me.

In the movie Sicko by Michael Moore (don’t shoot me), a lower class black woman tells the story of how her infant daughter had stopped breathing and had to be rushed to the hospital. However, her insurance provider refused to pay for treatment if her daughter was treated at that hospital. Instead, they wanted her to drive her dying daughter to a distant hospital where they would pay for it. The hospital that they were already at refused to treat the daughter, and the infant girl soon died.

How can people support a system that kills their fellow citizens for being too poor to afford insurance? And as many know, even having insurance is not enough. If our country ever wants to call itself humane or have any pride, we need universal, free healthcare. Anything else is murder.