"This is not liberty"

Below is an excerpt from a Sojourners article entitled "Health Care and Structural Violence" by Valerie Eleverton Dixon:

When health insurance is linked to employment, employees are forced to work jobs they despise. They must too often travel farther, work harder and longer for less pay and less satisfaction in order to keep the job because they cannot afford to lose health coverage. This is not liberty. Such is especially the case when a spouse or a child has a serious medical problem that requires continual treatment.

Moreover, this system of health care is burdensome to businesses that have to include the cost of health care in compensation packages in order to attract and keep good people. For people whose employers do not offer health insurance, for part-time or temporary workers, for self-employed people, buying individual health insurance is not an affordable option. So, they go without primary health care that could prevent more serious illnesses in the future.

Now that the nation is facing this problem and is taking steps to address it, some members of Congress are worried about how to pay for it. I do not recall such worried, furrowed brows over deficit spending and the national debt when the George W. Bush administration took this nation to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I do not recall an interest in going slowly and taking our time to “get it right” before going to war.

You really would think this stuff would be obvious, wouldn't you? But I learned something by reading some of the comments to this article. Conservatives are utterly horrified at the idea that someone will get an "entitlement". Well, with that principle, I think we ought not to be "entitled" to police protection or fire protection or paved roads. Heck, let's just let society descend into chaos. God forbid that anyone get some help that they don't personally pay for 100% !!! (Sheesh.)
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