I’m safe on board. Pull up the life rope – Roger Ebert’s Journal

Film critic Roger Ebert’s second blog post on health care reform has received almost 1000 comments; my comment is probably near the 600 zone. Here’s a direct link to my comment, but it’s copied below anyway. The more important place to start is Ebert’s post itself. He makes good points about having compassion for our fellow man, but like most folks who want to expand government, he appears to consider respecting individual liberty to be outside of the requirements of compassion and generosity. He seems to see the two forces as mutually exclusive, and is perfectly content to allow his version of compassion to override the freedom of everyone in the U.S..

As I point out in my comments, individual liberty and a compassionate society do not need to be mutually exclusive or competing things. There is another path, which would be pretty apparent if those desiring universal health care would give up their fixation on it having to be provided/guaranteed by government.

Roger,

I must have missed the part where you explain why government has to be the vehicle through which we pursue the obviously-noble goal of ensuring that all have sufficient health care. Advocates of Obamacare are quick to speak of the moral imperative of compassion, but are willing to dispose of the moral imperative of individual liberty in pursuit of their goal.

If we’re talking about fulfilling our moral obligation to our fellow man–we owe him both compassion AND individual liberty. The dream of universal health care can be achieved without government mandates and without government takings. We don’t need to push each other around in order to do the right thing.

Instead of looking to follow in the rest of the world’s footsteps–which historically does not at all fit America’s profile–we should look to lead the world to a new and better way. Which is not just America’s profile, it’s our original purpose.

It’s odd how liberals have been allowed to take the moral high ground in this debate, when it would be clearly more moral to solve this problem without resorting to the use of force. Some nice side effects of doing so would be that it wouldn’t divide our country against itself, and it wouldn’t be dependent on the whims of voters or Congress or presidential administrations. But I wonder…it seems like a lot of folks in the current debate wouldn’t be satisfied somehow if we solved the problem without using government to push each other around.

There is a way for the health care solution to peacefully become a permanent part of our society’s fabric–but it requires stepping away from the insistence that “universal health care” = “universal health care provided by the government”.

A universal health care system which exists outside of government, in the voluntary sphere of society, is the true ideal, and we should not let the lazy half-step that is socialized medicine substitute for the genuinely ethical solution that we could achieve instead.