Health Care - the larger Moral Picture

Watching the torturous health care reform first step in the house, one wonders weather Obama made the mistake of his life by not trying for a single payer solution or any universal and cheap solution even with insurance companies, but where the these companies are utilities and the cost is tightly control like in Holland.

It is now clear that the opposition to a single payer would have been identical to the opposition to the Obama bill in both the house and the senate. Why fight for crumbs when you can fight for the whole loaf?

This is where the bigger moral question becomes sharper and more acute. Health care is a right and always has been. In our country it is treated as a luxury, but that does make it optional or make it less of a right. After all, we employed torture despite it being illegal, i.e. practice is not necessarily proper and justified.

It is also clear that Obama doesn't see health care as a right, but rather as a service that we better provide to everyone without making too many people angry. After all, even Obama wouldn't fight for a fraction of a right, namely what he is doing now.

Morally, therefore, the current approach to health care reform fails to accept the right of American to be treated well when they fall ill. Instead, we are providing an extend health care service to more people and to people with service demands that are currently not serviced fully.

Once we made the moral decision that American do not have the right to quality health care, we are on a slippery slop. We let fanatics, crazies and obstructionists to pitch an ever growing tent for unserviceable people. Under the tent we have women who lost their legal right to abortion, 20 million illegal immigrant who have very few other rights despite working hard and paying taxes as much as the Joneses and many others who we naturally fall between the chairs of over-complex reform bill that seems to pay more attentions to the crazies than to the sane.

It is a proper moment to point to the moral black hole that the Catholic Bishops have inflicted upon women by demanding the abortion of abortion rights. Thier forceful intervention emphasizes that at a time of real unemployment approaching like a heavy train the 20% mark, they see unemployment as a minor issue compared to the abortion of abortion. Let's not forget their lack of action against the death penalty, a cruel prison system, a justice system that produces injustice on a whole sale level and with a strong tilt to go easy on the rich and privileged.

A point we tend to ignore and is seldom commented on is the role of the health insurance companies. At the outset, it is clear that their right to gouge the American people is recognized as superior to the right of Americans to quality health care. As repulsive as that statement is, there is no escaping it in the Obama reform plan. The constitution is famous for "unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" for individuals. There is no right mentioned there for health insurance companies to get fat eating our meager bread.

Thus, the current health care reform either by design or by succumbing to negative forces and ideas is morally very problematic.