There is something innate about me that prevents me from being interested in profit margins and maximum annual returns. I am not built to have making money be the object of my 40 hours a week. Sitting across from a perfectly nice, very well dressed one percent-er. We were talking about (I'll be purposefully vague here) electricity markets and investment risk, and somehow got into a discussion of health care. I steered the conversation there because I've been itching for the opportunity to poke one of these guys on the inequality issues we are seeing to start boiling over and this guy is not my boss.
After a long discussion during which he lays out costs and structural arguments against universal health care (health care wasn't a right in 1776) and for the idea that insurance companies be allowed to refuse coverage of those with pre-existing conditions (goes against the definition of insurance, which is payment for protection against an unknown and presumably if you have a pre-existing condition, there is a definite known.) I'll be generous and ignore the scenario where someone goes into an insurance-required check-up and discovers right then that they have cancer. Regardless if these are valid arguments in terms of nothing he's saying is in fact untrue there is still the issue of values. I value a society that thinks it's important to provide basic health care to all of its citizens. I value a government that adjusts its own goals as time passes and looks to the future needs of its people.
People that think we shouldn't have universal health care or protections for people with pre-existing conditions are hiding behind balance sheets and the Constitution. So what if the Founders didn't lay out a particular right to universal health care? They also didn't say women should be full citizens, and we adjusted to that reality when progress made it prudent. And screw the technical definition of insurance, the government should support people who get catastrophic illnesses because it can. If we didn't spend over $663 billion [PDF] on defense, maybe we could scrape by with making sure everyone had access to basic, preventive care that would avoid a lot of cost in the long-term and ensure that catastrophic illness doesn't cause bankruptcy.
The idea that makes me a liberal is that I think people matter. The collective people. Everyone. Together. And the reason I support the Occupy movement is because I think their attempt to galvanize those who recognize that our current state of inequality is driven by those in power being less concerned with the collective good and people than individual profits. Of course, the man across from me (with his monogrammed cuffs) would say that makes me a Communist.
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