Moyers on Universal Health Care as Moral Imperative
Bill Moyers speaks my mind in a discussion with Bill Maher on health-care reform:
"We're all in the same boat." That would be the metaphor that would change this [health-care "debate"], that's the moral message that America would send by adopting health care as a human need, which everybody should have access to. The moral message would be that we are in this together, that we care about each other.
All of us who have means will give up something in order to make sure that everybody has health care. I don't want to live in a country where I'm on a hospital floor getting an operation that costs $25,000 and two floors above me somebody's being denied that same surgery because he or she has no money.
What kind of civilization is that? What kind of moral order is that? It's not. It's an order where money, as you said earlier — some things money doesn't buy. It won't buy good public libraries. It won't buy good public schools. And some things do not have a price tag on them — they have a value system attached to them.
And health care for everyone, universal health care for every citizen, irrespective of your resources, is representative of a deeply moral society. And what do I mean by moral? A society that cares for the other.
[my transcribed excerpt from this video source. The discussion began in this video, but I couldn't transcribe everything.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Current Events, Personal Notebook
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on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 at 21.42
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Moyers nailed it, all right. That is the essential point. It's about humanity, about decency, compassion, morality and ethics. And, IMO, it's about being Christian, for those who profess such faith. It's all those things for which our conservative friends love to dismiss us as "bleeding-heart liberals" — a label I'll wear without excuse or apology.
It's things that come natural to those of us who learned in childhood to share our toys, feel another's hurt and shake hands with, saying "I'm sorry" — and meaning it — after a fight.
Unfortunately, it's things routinely dismissed and derided by those whose childhood didn't include those lessons, or did include them but to no effect.