"Health Care Reform and the American Character" by Congressman Paul Ryan (loon)

[armyowalgreens]

A friend of mine left this link on facebook and gave it a positive review. Knowing that my friend is a free-market whore, I figured this story is absolute shit. I've only read the first page, and my assumptions have pretty much been confirmed...


http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=136798025008&h=RIy41&u=xesh-&ref=nf
excerpt

While it's important to analyze the relative financial costs and benefits of health care proposals which Congress is considering, our greatest challenge cannot be limited to the economics of the issue. Our transcending concerns are moral and political. The American character itself and the principles of free market democracy which protect and preserve it may be lost beyond recovery if Congress chooses the wrong path to health care reform -- the path down which the Obama Administration seems determined to lead our country.
How are health care and American character linked?
Public health has always been a government priority. The unquestioned power to quarantine for contagious sicknesses in order to protect the community's health has been used for centuries. Selling unwholesome food and drink, carrying on industrial trades that infect or pollute the air, as well as neglect, unskillful management, and experimentation by doctors and pharmacists have traditionally been treated as crimes and grounds for civil lawsuits. Immunization programs to protect populations against disease have long been accepted as a legitimate government service.
The Framers of our Constitution were deeply influenced by the thought of William Blackstone, England's greatest legal thinker. In his Commentaries, Blackstone explained that every individual has a "right of personal security" which includes protection against acts that may harm personal health. This right is part of the natural right to life, which means that it does not come from government but from "nature and nature's God." As the American Founders declared, the purpose of government is not to create new rights but to secure pre-existing natural rights of all persons, to life as well as liberty and pursuit of happiness. In other words, the priority of protecting people's health, which is implicit in our founding principles, no more requires government to provide health care programs than, say, the legitimate concern that people be housed requires the government to build public housing. Government has a duty to secure these rights, but this obligation is normally met most effectively by establishing the legal and economic conditions for free markets that expand the opportunity and prosperity of all. When markets apparently fail to meet these needs properly -- today's health care delivery is an example -- government should begin not by filling the need itself but by looking to and correcting its own interventions and making competitive free markets more effective...

ugh