Memo to Rand Paul: Free Health Care is a Moral Imperative

No picture included today because I’m not having that dead weasel on his head clutter my pretty blog space.

A statement made a few years ago by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, now running for the Republican nomination for President, has begun circulating again, presumably so anyone who might be inclined in supporting his 2016 candidacy might be reminded that the interests he is looking out for do not align in any way with what would actually be best for the overwhelming majority of the country.  Here it is.  Try not to vomit.

“With regard to the idea of whether or not you have a right to healthcare, you have to realize what that implies… I’m a physician, that means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me, it means you believe in slavery.  It means you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the assistants, the nurses… There’s an implied threat of force, do you have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away, and force me to take care of you?  That’s ultimately what the right to free healthcare would be.” – Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)

How does one even begin to deconstruct a statement of such careless, asinine, take-my-ball-and-go-home nincompoopery?  The slavery allegory, deserving a Godwin’s Law of its own, is especially offensive coming from a son of privilege with a Southern accent.  Dwelling on the image, one imagines a ludicrous scene of an army of sick people coughing and hacking as they (weakly) kick in poor gosh-darn put-upon Dr. Paul’s door and demand at the point of a crutch that he hand over the antibiotics.  If there weren’t so many people suffering because they can’t afford to even get into the same room with the elusive golden chalice that is American health care, it would be worthy of a laugh.  If I didn’t know someone personally who was going through a rough time because her access to care is limited by her financial means, I might cluck my tongue as I look down on high from my enviable Canadian system.  But no, Rand Paul, you’ve pissed me right off, and your apparent unfamiliarity with the Hippocratic Oath alone should be cause for you to lose your medical license (the status of which I understand is dubious at best).

Rand Paul’s problem is that fundamentally, he does not give a rat’s furry arse about anyone but himself (the opposite of the concept of “public servant.”)  He seems to genuinely believe that having to share space with other people unlike himself is an irritant.  I have always found libertarianism as a philosophy to be a giant crock of donkey doo-doo, given that aside from those guys who proclaim their own kingdoms on ranches in the middle of nowhere and usually find their utopias promptly ended by the FBI, no libertarian truly wants to live free of all government.  I mean, surely Rand Paul isn’t in favor of having to pave his own streets, treat his own drinking water and dispose of his own sewage when he has to take a dump, right?  And when Kim Jong-Un finally sends his crack troops to invade Lexington, does Rand want to be out on the front lines at the head of a hastily cobbled militia?  No.  Libertarians like Rand Paul are for all the conveniences of government, they just don’t want to have to deign to pay for them, or obey the laws that they personally do not like.  When it comes to the idea of socialized medicine, for Rand Paul (who is rich, of course), the idea that he might have to sacrifice a few of his pennies so that a single mom working three jobs doesn’t have to sell her furniture when her child develops pneumonia, is toxic anathema to be fought to his dying breath.  Obviously, to him, she just hasn’t worked hard enough to be able to have her child breathe properly, and doesn’t deserve the sparsest notion of help from the rest of her fellow citizens.

“Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?”  Even Dickens would have found Rand Paul’s point of view hyperbolically cruel.

Choosing to live in civilization instead of out on the fringes is by its nature accepting a social compact with our immediate neighbours and our countrymen as a whole.  We come to accept that there are certain things we are not permitted to do in exchange for other privileges.  I’m okay with the fact that I’m not allowed to lounge bare-ass naked in the middle of the street in front of my house if it means that my weird neighbour across the way can’t do it either.  We also accept that there are certain public goods and services to which we must each contribute a modest share.  I’m also totally okay with the tiny percentage of my total property tax bill that ensures that my garbage and recycling is collected each week without me having to set up an individual account with and survive three credit reference checks by the ABC Trash Removal Company, and my same neighbour’s potential inability to afford it won’t mean I have to fight off the gulls picking away at the stench wafting from the mountain of used diapers and doggie waste bags piling up on his lawn every time I step outside.  The Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Republican, famously said that “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”  The notion that free health care is not included as one of the core tenets of that civilized society is morally reprehensible.  That a significant segment of the American population fights as hard as it does to ensure the system remains in its crushing, inequitable state is a testament to the brainwashing power of significantly monied interests controlling the message – look no further than dirt poor red staters screaming “socialism!” when the Affordable Care Act (i.e. Obamacare) is mentioned in casual conversation.

Since there are copious misconceptions about what socialized medicine entails (furthered naturally by those same monied interests noted above), it is probably incumbent on me as a Canadian to dispel them to my American audience by providing a few examples from personal experience.  Here’s how it works when you get sick in the province of Ontario, where I reside:  you call your doctor and make an appointment.  If the doctor can’t see you soon enough for your liking, you can go to a walk-in clinic or, if it’s much more serious, the emergency room.  When you arrive you hand the receptionist a government-issued Health Card, which has your provincial insurance number on it.  That’s it.  You never get a bill, no bureaucratic middleman (or Sarah Palin boogeyman “death panel”) evaluates your claim, nothing.  Your medical records are a confidential matter for you and your doctor.  Nobody else.  If you’re required to be admitted to hospital overnight or longer, you might pay extra (on a willing basis, it’s not mandatory) if you want an upgrade to a semi-private or private room, or if you want additional services like a TV or a phone at your bedside.  But you will never be charged for your health care.  The government pays for it.  And Canadian doctors are not exactly working for slave wages, either.  A 2012 survey found the average family physician making $328,000 a year in Canada.  Even in our system which Rand Paul likens to slavery, no one expects doctors to work for free, and they are most certainly not.

About fifteen years ago I was hospitalized for a collapsed lung.  I was not working at the time so I had no health benefits or insurance.  The cost for my week-long stay was $12, for said phone.  I wasn’t charged for the painkillers or the sedatives or the tube they had to drill into my side or the electric pump draining the blood and pus from my pleural cavity.  In the likes of Rand Paul’s mind, I should have just died of it and/or gone bankrupt to pay for getting better, instead of burdening millionaires with an extra few dollars on their taxes.  Would that have improved life for everyone else?  Would it be better that my wife never would have met me, or that my adopted son would never have known his father?

Screw you, Rand Paul.  Screw your privileged pelvis to a rusty cake stand.

The Canadian health care system is not perfect, and unfortunately important things like eye and chiropractic care that were covered when my parents were alive have been stripped away as the years have gone on and voters have demanded lower and lower taxes.  Dental care has never been covered, which is just stupid as the last time I checked, teeth were part of the body and rotten teeth can impact your entire system.  But no Canadian worries that if they ever have a heart attack, the paramedics will demand to see a bank statement before they apply the defibrillators.  Getting cancer doesn’t mean having to hock the house to afford the chemo.  In fact, our socialized health care system is so deeply ingrained into our cultural identity that our governing Conservative Party, while full of Republican sympathizers who would love to see us embrace a fully privatized health care system – including our prime minister – dares not even approach that third rail lest they face a complete electoral wipeout.  It seems to be understood for the most part among Canadians that we are in this together and we owe it to each other to ensure that illness does not lead to complete ruin.  Part of the problem is that while it has not been as bad here as in the States, we too have felt the effects of the systematic attack against the government social safety net through the insane machete-slashing of corporate and higher-income tax rates that has been going on since the election of Ronald Reagan.  Just make it better for the rich guys, we’re told over and over again, and they will shower the rest of us with prosperity.  I’ve already gone on at length about how fanatically and fatally stupid that argument is.  It makes even less sense to claim that getting the government out of the health care system will lead to its improvement.

Government is the means by which we pool our resources to provide for the needs that we cannot fulfill on our own.  Individually we can’t afford police or water treatment plants, but we all need to drink water and we need someone to stop the bad guys from stealing our stuff.  And because we collectively pay other people to do this for us through our taxes, we can stretch and contribute to the maximum of our potential in other areas.  The same thinking should apply to health care, and I’m always stymied as to how ostensible economists can’t see the benefits of taking health care out of the personal expense stream.  I don’t know what the going monthly rate for an American health insurance policy is, but I’m guessing if it’s several hundred dollars on the cheap end, that’s several hundred that isn’t going into discretionary spending, you know, the kind that actually boosts the economy.  Cutting a rich guy’s taxes might mean that he can afford a few more flatscreen TV’s for his beach house, but he’s still only one man with a limited ability to make use of multiple televisions, so he’s only going to buy so many.  But if three hundred million people have the cost of health care taken off their monthly balance sheet so that they can now afford a new TV, well, that’s a positive boon for the manufacturers of flatscreens, and that’s a lot of new jobs and economic growth in the flatscreen television industry alone.

“But a socialized health care system will be too expensive!  We can’t afford it!” cry the Grover Norquists of the world.  Nope, I don’t buy that, pun intended.  The United States is spending $700 billion a year on its defense budget and most of the right wing wants that budget increased.  America has the money.  Gobs of it.  A great deal of it being pissed away on weapons systems that the military doesn’t even want, and in tax breaks and loopholes for dirty energy companies and the like who are quite literally laughing at how easy they’ve got it.  America is awesome at coming up with ways to kill people and pollute the planet (making us all sicker in fact) – not so much at taking care of the inhabitants of the “greatest country in the world.”  Again, that’s by design, and until its people cease swallowing the lies being spoon-fed to them and voting against their own interests, nothing will change.  The American Dream should by its definition include the idea that freedom should also be freedom from the financial burden of illness – the understanding that sometimes, people fall through no fault of their own, and that helping them stand up isn’t coddling them, it’s letting them walk again under their own power.  I do not see how anyone could argue with that, unless they were the sort to derive a perverse joy in watching others be hurt.  (Is that you, Rand Paul?)  Finance shouldn’t even be part of the equation when it comes to this.  Some things are more important in this life than the bottom line.  Any government implementing extreme austerity at the expense of the welfare of its people needs to take a hard look at what exactly it is they’re trying to govern – a great-looking spreadsheet for a realm of ruined faces?

I could not look that hypothetical single mother in the eye and tell her that she should suck it up and get used to the street with her sick kid because it’s more important that we balance the budget.  If it is, then you know what?  Address the revenue side of the equation.  Raise the taxes.  Make the rich pay more; they’ll survive without that extra flatscreen.  Punish the companies who are offshoring their profits and hoarding their cash, or whining about needing to lay people off because of health care costs (or worse, Hobby Lobbying about what health care they will or won’t cover).  They’re lying.  So long as lives are being destroyed by the unavailability of proper health care, no one who thinks of themselves as moral should rest easy.

Why isn’t that what’s keeping the Rand Pauls of the world up at night?