I've been a long time lurker here at DKos but this is my first post. But being a Canadian and watching the healthcare debate in the U.S. has been excruciating to say the least and I feel inclined to speak up and offer my opinion.
Much of the information being disseminated about universal healthcare is cherry-picked at best and completely false at worst. That these charlatans like Dick Morris and Rick Scott get a platform to preach their gloom and doom predictions about healthcare reform is infuriating to me in the first place. That the media tries to depict their credibility as equal to that of the proponents of a universal plan just makes it that much worse. We obviously have the facts on our side given that universal healthcare works so well in so many countries including America's neighbor to the north. And yet our counter-attacks seldom seem to make it through the media filter. And if they do I still find there is one component that is lacking.
You can argue about the cost and the effectiveness of a universal plan until you're blue in the face but I think we're missing the biggest reason to implement such a system: It's the right thing to do. It's not a question of cost, it's a question of morality and that's how we need to frame the debate.
Canadians know this. It doesn't bother me that I'm paying for someone else's healthcare through my tax dollars because I know that someone else is doing the same for me. To me it sounds very fair. It's a system that benefits everyone. I don't see it as redistribution but as taking care of my fellow Canadians.
What doesn't sound fair is having a system that (as I understand it), if you don't have insurance, forces you to pay an exorbitant amount of money to save your life. Not only does it not sound fair, it sounds entirely immoral to me that you should have to ransom your life if you are uninsured and you get sick. And if you are insured, the insurance company could decide not to pay for the operation or only to pay for part of it or even to drop you all together. How is that moral? If you have to pay to save your life are you not a hostage rather than a patient?
Universal healthcare exists for the welfare of the people. Is it perfect? No. But insurance companies exist to make a profit. Is it right that human beings should be at the mercy of their ledger?
And I think that's how we should be approaching this issue. We should be aggressively arguing that for-profit health care is morally wrong. Here are some more arguments I would suggest posing:
"If you believe that people should pay for the privilege of healthcare then does it not follow that you believe that a person's life is only worth as much as their earning power? Is a poor person's life worth less than a rich person's?"
I forget who it was that said it but they were basically arguing that if there was a public option then hospitals would be overrun making it more difficult for those who could pay and I couldn't believe someone could be so callous to their fellow human beings. Would having shorter wait times for the insured and the uninsured staying sick or even dying be preferable?
It really gets on my nerves when people gripe about "freeloaders" and "welfare queens". Yes our society should reward hard work and determination but everyone's life has inherent worth and we shouldn't allow them to suffer because they can't afford a procedure. God forbid you should have to part with some of your money to help someone else.
This next one is sort of a continuation of the last one. Let's throw in some cognitive dissonance for good measure. This one's for the pro-lifers.
"If you believe that abortion is immoral because it terminates the life of a fetus and that that life has inherent worth how do you reconcile that belief with the belief that healthcare should be for-profit? Do the lives of the uninsured not have inherent worth also?"
The same question can also apply to capital punishment and war as well. I've never understood how one could be against killing a fetus but have no problem with killing a fully grown human being.
Here's a religious one:
"Do you think that Jesus would approve of for-profit healthcare?"
I can't fathom how you could answer "yes" on that one without doing some serious contortions.
I'll admit I'm no expert on the American healthcare system so if I've got something seriously wrong you have the right to roast me for it in the comments. But my point is that healthcare shouldn't a privilege, it should be a right. And a system that doles out care depending on how much you can pay is morally wrong and I think that's how we should be arguing this issue. It's time to take back the debate from the lobbyists and their army of teabaggers.