As a lead in to this next clip, taken from last night's Republican debate:
In the clip, Wolf Blitzer asks Ron Paul, a former physician, the following hypothetical question... a 30 year old guy with a decent job decides he's young and healthy and doesn't need health insurance. Something catastrophic happens, requiring massive amounts of health care. Who should pay? Paul starts to dance around the question by saying that freedom requires people to take responsibility for their actions. The crowd cheers what they're hearing. Then Wolf follows up with "Are you saying that society should just let him die?"
The crowd shouts Yes.
You would expect human beings to shout no, but that's the Tea Party for you.
But okay, the man in the example did make a conscious decision to opt out of insurance despite having a good job that probably offered him a decent health care package, so maybe there are some genuinely hardcore libertarians out there... all of which just highlights that Wolf Blitzer is one of the dumber mouthpieces working in the national media today.
Why would you couch the health care debate into such a stupid example? Mr. Tea Party... let's consider reckless irresponsibility? How say you?
Why not make the Red Meat answer questions about people who have shitty jobs that don't offer health care as part of the package and can't afford to get reamed by for-profit health insurance companies? Why not make them answer questions about how people die from insurance company paperwork mistakes? Why not make them answer questions about Randy Shepherd from the Wayback Machine, who couldn't get private health insurance because of a pre-existing condition and then lost his heart transplant when Arizona Medicaid slashed budgets (which is exactly the kind of death panel Palin described in her Obamacare Facebook Fear-a-palooza)?
A make-believe 30 year-old with a good job turning down health insurance feels so disconnected from reality that Blitzer's question seems irrelevant. I want the Tea Party to answer questions about real, heart-breaking, avoidable situations that their own members could potentially face.
Before the crowd's disturbing shouts in response to Blitzer's "just let him die," Ron Paul made the point that "freedom is all about taking your own risks."
Maybe freedom is all about that in the most literal sense, but who does that benefit? Mitigating risk is an important part of modern society. Handling an issue so that the collective can move on and deal with other things is the whole reason we domesticated animals, tamed fire, and learned to grow crops. Wouldn't it be nice if that family of four right at the poverty level didn't have to choose between getting their sick child life-saving medical care and getting their financial lives completely obliterated?
It's a genuinely stupid consideration that I believe is holding us back as a country. This isn't something we need to deal with on an individual level given our nation's collective wealth. Other countries have given us a possible framework that could work. Hell, some of our own states have as well (what's up Vermont and Massachusetts?).
Health care is not a right, it's a social good and we should start treating it as such.
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