Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Deception, Coercion and Healthcare



I wonder if President Obama’s blatant and repeated deception about health care plans is enough to get at least a few people to think twice about the basic need for “the pill” as a part of healthcare. I know, I know.... You don't think the two are connected.  You should reconsider.

In the “real” world, it must surely cause at least a few thoughtful individuals some degree of astonishment that the nation’s chief executive would have to deceive on a worldwide scale in order to sell insurance.  Who would have thought? What is it all about?

The reason the U. S. Government has become the nation’s insurance broker, number 1, is that the government now thinks that the health of the nation depends on government control, especially birth control.

Is there any real danger out there today that your average Jane America cannot get the pill? Does anyone really think so? For that matter, do even the poorest among us in these United States have trouble accessing birth control measures? I am willing to be enlightened if someone cares to try to prove that they do.

If birth control is being covered for health purposes, one might ask, with all the dangers of the pill, whose health is in question?  Remember, the pill is used because the body is functioning normally, not because it isn’t.  People do not need birth control like a patient needs antibiotics for a serious infection. Is it now the government’s objective to direct people, poor and not so poor, to use more birth control, sterilizations and abortifacients, so much so that the risks of using these things must be ignored?  Is it reasonable to ignore the risks if this is supposed to be about health?

Now that we are learning that insurance policies are being cancelled because they do not meet minimum standards, the factor in the cancellations that cannot be ignored is that, according to the government, they are subpar in the birth control department. 

As strange as it is to us, we have witnessed the imposition of birth control upon the public as a major factor in the president’s healthcare initiative from the beginning. Birth control holds so much meaning for the government, in fact, that the Congress and the Presidential administration will not even allow those who object to the coverage of birth control to opt out of it. If you do not do what you are told to do, according to Chief Justice Roberts you can be taxed and fined into submission. 

The pill is now used inordinately in women’s healthcare to cover everything from acne to PMS to endometriosis, but you haven’t seen anything, yet. Men and women, poor and not-so-poor, who are now brought into these government-approved plans will be required to adhere to whatever guidelines are now imposed with the force of the taxing authority of the Congress and the executive power of the President. If the IRS—I mean one’s doctor, sorry--says “health” requires that one be sterilized, take the pill, or abort for that matter, there is nothing and no one to stop them. 

I hope that you don’t think that nothing like this will happen. It has, in fact, already happened in the United States.  Do you know about Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927)? In that decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Court ruled that a state statute authorizing compulsory sterilization of certain “undesirables,” "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This decision has never been explicitly overruled.  

How much are you willing to wager that new healthcare guidelines will not be used to impose birth control for your own good? Deception and the force of government are setting the new standards in your healthcare. This is not a good way to inspire confidence in the nation’s new socialized system. Deception and government force are never the right ingredients in just governance. This does not bode well for the future of freedom or the health of our nation’s citizens.


2 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

Very apt observations, Father Richard. Regarding government control over health care, I imagine that the roots of the problem can be traced at least to the concept of "right" and the role of positive law stemming from thinkers like Rousseau.

Aquinas, for example, knew that all authority is from God and that the role of positive law is to apply and concretize the natural law, helping people more easily to become virtuous and thus happy within a society, society itself being a natural good of man.

Rousseau and similar thinkers, on the other hand, since they see authority as coming from the people themselves, on the basis of social contract theory, see the role of positive law as being to ensure that people do not infringe the rights of others. Their understanding of rights is such that they are limited only by the rights of other people. So, as long as what you are doing doesn't hurt anyone else, it should not be restricted.

The latter seems, at first, to tend toward Libertarianism and less government enforcement and the former to something more like totalitarianism. In reality, however, it is precisely the opposite. The latter approach to authority and rights, because they lack objective basis and are seen as per se unlimited, limited in practice only by the rights of others, leads to the enforcement of what the majority or at least those who come to power perceive as the will of the majority without any reference to virtue or happiness, indeed without any reference to man's end.

Thus the situation we are in. The government pretends to be concerned about the rights of people, but what they mean by "right" has no reference to man's true good but only his will conceived apart from reference to any end. The next step, as you observe, can easily be an enforcement of what is perceived as the desire of the majority and, soon, the person becomes subordinated to the state. What started out with each man as sovereign, his rights limited only by the rights of other men, ends with man totally subject to the state.

God is the source of human dignity and rights. If we lose God, we lose man. If we lose the rights of God, we lose the rights of man.