Reuters reports today that The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia is hearing arguments about whether or not a state (Virginia) may challenge the constitutionality of a federal law. As you might imagine, there is a balanced government position on this matter. What we’re really getting at in the health care debate is this: how far can the government of Washington D.C. reach into the lives of Americans?
To simplify a complicated issue, I propose that there are a few things that reasonable people can agree on, and these points are:
1. health insurance is expensive;
2. without health insurance, if you get a major illness or injury, the financial burden may be disastrous;
3. no one wants their fellow man to suffer financial ruin through no fault of their own; and
4. in a compassionate world, there would be a way to care for all of the most unfortunate of our fellow man.
Where we encounter difficulty is in what manner we can properly address this manifestation of inequity. Despite beliefs to the contrary, evidently, by large segments of the American public, health insurance is not a civil right, nor is it a human right. If insisting the opposite could cure the problem, we would be obliged to insist that mandated home ownership would cure homelessness; and our recent national experience in the real estate market might be an effective argument against pushing home ownership as government policy. We might also note that when a person is disabled or dies without disability or life insurance, the costs to the family can be devastating, but this does not lead politicians to call for universal disability insurance, or universal life insurance.
What the health care debate is all about, again, is the reach of government under the guise of compassion for our fellow man. I mean “guise of compassion” to be read without malice, and possibly, without awareness on behalf of advocates for national health care reform. They may indeed be well-intentioned and not see the fallacy of their ground. At this point, however, there is a reasonable solution that is simple to understand, and would be readily accepted by most Americans; I might be so bold as to say it would be accepted by all Americans.
Not a word therein absolves us of responsibility for ourselves
This paradigm, in which a domestic matter affecting the lives of Americans is either discharged, or it is not, by a local unit of government, is precisely how American government was intended to work. Our system is neither mysterious nor difficult to comprehend. James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist #45:
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
In plain English, national governments must be occupied with national issues. Local governments must be occupied with local issues. National issues are those that Madison identified, to which it is reasonable to add administering the national courts, mitigating disputes between the states, and serving as a defender of last resort of the inalienable rights of the citizens of the country. That’s it.
Our health care/health insurance debate should be a good thing, but it’s not. We should be debating what the just duties of government are at each level, including the self, but we’re not. Like a sick patient putting off going to the doctor for fear of what the diagnosis will be, we’re delaying an inevitable reckoning, and making that much harder the work that will have to be done, or the patient will die.
