Some misguided liberals and progressives have supported Ron Paul in his presidential bid and in his efforts to rally Americans for “freedom.” I have pointed out before that Ron Paul’s notion of freedom is one that should be repulsive to most Americans since some of his most active allies in the last year have included white supremacists, libertarians who oppose minimum wage laws, workplace safety laws, and environmental protection laws.
But if you’re a Ron Paul supporter and you didn’t get it before you ought to get it now. Ron Paul, himself a wealthy doctor, is also against Obama’s health care reform bill and has stated his reasons quite openly:
As far as the Texas Congressman is concerned, healthcare is not a right. “I don’t have a right to medical care,” he emphatically states. In his view, the constitution only guarantees citizens “life, liberty and (the right to) keep the fruits of my labor.”
Don’t have the right to healthcare? I guess when you’re wealthy enough to never have to worry about going without it, those words trip off the tongue quite easily. For the rest of us, securing our right not to be made homeless or bankrupt because we had the misfortune to have a serious illness or injury is definitely a part of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Filed under: Economic crisis
Honey – as soon as the government cannot pay for universal healthcare and they start rationing treatment – then healthcare will no longer “be a right”.
And what will happen to your “right” to decide what treatments YOU want? Hah! Good freakin luck.
You are fooling yourself if you think government administration of healthcare is going to be a good thing – just look at Massachusetts. Even LEGAL immigrants are being dropped like flies.
Ron Paul is right, and the government has NO business in the healthcare business.
Wow, I surely am worried about how the government will administer health care. After all they might decide which treatments I can get!! They might even make it impossible for me to get certain treatments because they are cost prohibitive!!
I am soooooo happy that doesn’t happen with private insurance!!
And that closing line…again, wow, I am amazed at the depth of insight that it reveals. Government has no business in the health care business…but insurance companies and health care corporations whose only concern is their profits make GREAT custodians of the peoples’ interest in health care don’t they? Because, after all, they have shown themselves to sooooo accountable….sooooo concerned about the well-being of people who need health care…..soooo democratic….soooo responsive to criticism and interested in reform.
So far every shill for the insurance companies and health care corporations that I have heard from on this issue has presented the same kind of blinding intellectual insights as reflected in your comments. I can generally interpret them in one three ways: 1) they reflect the perceptions of people who are so accustomed to a privileged level of access to health care that they have no understanding whatsoever of what the rest of us have to do to get health care insurance coverage . . . or to do without it, 2) they reflect the deliberate deceptions of people who shamelessly lie to the American people out of sheer selfishness and greed, or 3) they reflect the views of people who, contrary to their own self interest, have allowed themselves to be utterly deluded by their corporate masters – human beings who are free in name only because they are manacled by their own slavish obedience to the corporate line.
You have the right to life … not to a kidney dialysis or an endless prescription of cold medicine.
You cant have the right to something (good or service) that involves someone else’s labor and property. Forcing someone to give up their labor & property for your sake is called slavery. Also called theft which is immoral.
So you agree to mortgage your home and sell all you have and put your family on the street in order to pay for someone else’s triple bypass surgery who ate McDonald’s all his life?
If you believed health care is a right you wouldn’t have any money in the bank because you would give it away to help pay for other’s healthcare.
Didn’t even mention the economic side of the argument …
Hmm. Let’s see….it sounds like you’re saying that no one has a right to anything that they do not pay for themselves. I suppose that would mean that if you moved to a new town and your house caught fire, you wouldn’t have the right to have the local fire department come to put your fire out because – hey – you haven’t paid for it yet! For that matter, if you’re a kid you obviously couldn’t have the right to an education because you haven’t paid any taxes yet . . . come back when you’ve put in a few years on the job, kid, and we’ll see about that grade school education. Sounds like an interesting theory in RonPaulonia, but here on Planet Earth it doesn’t make much sense.
Ever heard of property or local taxes or how about a volunteer fire department?
You’re right you don’t have a right to the fire dept. or for someone else to pay and provide you education for free. Good for you, you are starting to catch on…
This is the sort of dog in the manger / I got mine attitude that is destroying America. You don’t have a right unless you personally paid for it – in other words, how much rights you have depends on how much money you have. Ironic for a nation founded on slave labor for which it never has paid.