Depending on who you ask, the Democrat’s health care reform efforts fall somewhere on the political spectrum between “dead” for at least another generation and “at the two-yard line” of reaching a final deal. I tend to believe reality falls somewhere much closer to the later sentiment than the former. On January 30, for example, Jonathon Cohn of The New Republic wrote:

“There seems to be a plan in place for enacting reform, even with the Massachusetts setback.”

Despite this “plan,” however, the political environment for reform has very definitely been elevated from the “Use Caution” warning level to “INSANELY TOXIC!” The Democratic rank-and-file are wavering, and even that’s putting it lightly.

This post represents the first in a series that intends to better prepare proponents of reform (and all its component benefits) to help congress “punch it through” and then hopefully defend a final reform package come the November elections.

That brings us to the question of what is the morally right thing to do? To answer this question, lets first take a few lines from Paul Krugman:

“There is a morally coherent argument against guaranteed health care, which basically comes down to saying that life my be unfair, but it’s not the job of the government to rid the world of injustice. If some people can’t afford health insurance, this argument would assert, that’s unfortunate, but the government has no business forcing other people to help them out through higher taxes. If some people inherit bad genes that make them vulnerable to illness, or acquire conditions at some point in their lives that make it impossible for them to get insurance from then on, well, there are many strokes of bad luck in life. The government can’t fix them all, and there’s no reason to single out these troubles in particular.”

Perhaps even more repugnant, when I engaged a bunch of TEA Party protesters outside an event for Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), they simply told me (in their plain speaking ways) that a single mother who can’t afford health insurance should “die” if she gets diagnosed with cancer. “Then she should die” were their exact words. They continued: “If she can’t take care of herself then we’d all be better off without her anyway.”

That’s essentially the moral argument against reform but yet it’s one you almost never hear in the public discourse because its one that the majority of voters disagree with. Some of the most essential parts of reform, such as outlawing the practice of insurance companies denying people based on preexisting conditions, poll overwhelming well. That’s why the opponents of reform nearly always stick to the line that doing the morally right thing to do isn’t possible…..because the moral case for universal health care isn’t what’s in dispute.

So let’s do an experiment:

Next time you encounter someone who is opposed to health care reform, ask them “well what is the morally right thing to do?”. If they come up with a morally coherent argument against health care reform, please do let me know. If they quickly descend into “well health care reform isn’t possible” simply tell them that every other industrialized country insures a greater percentage of their population than we do, for only a fraction the cost.

This fact will be the topic of my next post on health care, so please stay tuned.

- Matt