That’s the question posed by Dr. William Anderson in The Weekly Standard. Anderson, a retired physician and Harvard instructor, examines the premises that set us apart from other “advanced nations” that have adopted universal health care. According to Anderson, it comes down to a view of human nature at the core of American exceptionalism.
America is the only advanced country whose founding assumption is popular sovereignty. This is a proposition that stands with hardly a seconding voice throughout the contemporary international community. Yet it is the taproot of American exceptionalism.
Even here, however, the principle of government subordination to the people is by no means universally accepted. It has never been firmly ratified by our political class, those spiritual descendants of Europe’s nobility. Our soi-disant elite appear to view with dismay their countrymen’s continuing preference for self-rule.
Thus arises the question of corporal ownership. For Americans, the answer has been settled. Since the terrible bloodletting of the Civil War, and now excepting military service, ownership of one’s body is a matter between the individual and God, with no intermediation by government.
But according to the “progressive” view, we are members of the organic state, to which we owe allegiance and from which we derive our rights and identity. And what the state gives, it can also take away.
So let’s make up our minds. Does the government, in the last analysis, own your body, or do you? If your answer is the former, be aware that you have opted for veterinary medicine, for you are now accepting the moral status of a domestic animal. If your answer is the latter, you must accept responsibility to make mortal decisions for yourself, and pay for the care that you want with money that you have reason to see as your own.
Such money is not out of reach. Medical savings accounts, amalgamated with catastrophic insurance, could take the place of the ad hoc hodgepodge of plans, schemes, dissimulations, and promises under which we are now burdened and threatened.
Isn’t it strange that “progressives” have adopted the view of those who advocated for chattel slavery?
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